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THE LAST FOUR MONTH 

HOW THE WAR WAS WON 



BY 



MAJOR-GENERAL SIR F. MAURICE 



K.C.M.G., C.B. 



WITH MAPS 



N ON-REFE RT 




SiALv/g) • gas 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1919 



33 M4 



Copyright, 1919, 
By Little, Brown, and Compant. 

All rights reserved 

Published, November, 1919 



Dtc -e 1919 



Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Gushing Co., 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



©CI.A535 950 



PREFACE 

Who won the war? is a question that has been 
often asked. In the countries of all the great Allied 
Powers there have been found those who answered 
it to their own satisfaction as patriots, because it 
is easy to demonstrate that the war would not have 
been won, as and when it was won, had any of 
those countries failed to do what it actually achieved. 
Most of us, however, are agreed that victory was the 
result of combination, and I am convinced that that 
opinion will grow stronger the better the story is 
known. During the struggle the news we received 
of the doings of the armies of our Allies was natu- 
rally even more limited than was that of the doings 
of our own men, and it was not easy to allot to each 
its place in the general scheme. 

In this book I have sought to give a picture of 
Foch's great campaign and to sketch in due propor- 
tion the parts which went to make up the whole. I 
have reduced my descriptions of the battles to the 
simplest terms, because my object is to explain the 
broad causes of success and of failure, and there is 
danger, in entering into details of operations on so 
vast a scale, of losing sight of the wood for the trees. 
As no story of a campaign can be complete unless 

V 



Preface 

it describes the intentions, aims and feelings of the 
enemy, at least at the most critical periods, I have 
collected the best information available on these 
points from captured documents or from publications 
in Germany. Fortunately, there has in that country 
been considerable public discussion between Hinden- 
burg, Ludendorff and their critics as to the conduct 
of the former during the period with which I am 
here chiefly concerned, and material has not been 
lacking. 

F. Maurice. 

London, July 10, 1919. 



VI 



CONTENTS 

FAQB 

Preface v 

GHAPTBR 

I What Went Befobe 1 

Unity of Command. — The British Reverses in 
the Spring. 

n FocH versus Ludendorff 53 

Foch on the Defensive. — Breaking the Barrier 
in the West. — The Rival Methods. 

in The Preparation for Armageddon ... 90 
The Second Battle of the Marne. — Haig's 
Offensive. — The Americans at St. Mihiel. 

rV Armageddon 125 

The Hindenburg Line. — The American Battle 
of the Meuse-Argonne. — Gom-aud in Champagne. 

— Haig Breaks the Hindenbm-g Line. — King 
Albert's Advance into Belgium. — The Result of 
Armageddon. 

V Ludendorff Tries to Rally .... 178 

The Delays to the Allied Advance. — The Diffi- 
culties of the Americans. — Ludendorff 's Plan of 
Retreat. — How it was Defeated. 

VI The Last Push . . ... . • .205 

The Americans Advance to Sedan. — Gouraud 
Reaches Mezieres. — The British Enter Maubeuge 
and Mons. — The Condition of the German Army. 

— Was the Armistice Premature ? 

MAPS 

PAQH 

Main German Defensive Systems, September, 1918 . . 127 
The Western Front 246 



THE LAST FOUR MONTHS 



THE LAST FOUR MONTHS 

CHAPTER I 

What Went Before 

Unity of Command — The British Reverses 
in the Spring 

In Europe 1917 was a year of disappointment for 
the arms of the Allies; only in Asia, where our 
earlier ventures had failed, did fortune smile on us. 
At the beginning of that year Ludendorff and 
Hindenburg brought off their first coup on the 
Western Front, when they withdrew the German 
forces from the awkward position in which they were 
placed as the result of the first battle of the Somme, 
and retired behind the Hindenburg line, which then 
first became famous. By this manoeuvre they 
checked the plans of the Allies and brought about 
the failure of General Nivelle's great offensive upon 
which such high hopes had been set. The result of 
this failure had been to throw a great strain upon 
the British Army, which had to obtain for the 
French the time to recover. In the battle of Arras 
AUenby had won the greatest success yet gained by 

1 



The Last Four Months 



British arms in France, but Haig had been forced 
to continue that battle to the stage when, the enemy 
having recovered from his first shock, progress was 
slow and losses were heavy. In June, Plumer had 
brilliantly cleared the Messines Ridge and obliterated 
the Ypres salient, which for nearly three years had 
been a sore spot on our front; but the French still 
needed relief, and at the end of July the long, slow 
struggle which ended on the Passchendaele Ridge 
had begun. Then, just at the time when the German 
forces had been so weakened by that battle that there 
was good prospect of reaping at Cambrai the fruits 
of the year's campaign, there had come the surprise 
of Caporetto, the collapse of the Italian Army on 
the Isonzo, its retreat with very heavy losses to the 
Piave, and the despatch of large forces from France 
to the help of our Ally. In this year the Germans 
committed one of their cardinal blunders in proclaim- 
ing unlimited U-boat warfare, which added decisively 
to the number of their foes ; but the consequences 
to themselves of that blunder were not immediate, 
while we at once saw our sea communications en- 
dangered and our people threatened with very 
serious privation if not starvation. In Mesopo- 
tamia Maude overcame the Turkish army at Kut 
and drove their beaten troops through Baghdad, 
while AUenby ended the year's campaigns with a 
triumph at Gaza and Beersheba and with the capture 
of Jerusalem. But history will certainly count the 
entry of the United States of America into the war 

2 



What Went Before 



and the Russian Revolution as the two outstanding 
events of 1917, the two events which exercised the 
most far-reaching influence upon the course of the 
war. 

Early in the year it had become apparent to the 
military authorities of the Allies that the results of 
the Russian Revolution would be felt before the 
military power of the United States could become 
effective on the Western Front, In short, it was 
clear that the Germans were going to get a start in 
the race, just as they got a start in 1914, and that 
consequently the Allies would be faced with a period 
of danger in which they would have to stand on the 
defensive. 

At a meeting of the Allied Commanders-in-chief 
and chiefs of staffs held in Paris in June, 1917, to 
consider the military policy of the Allies in these 
circumstances, it was recommended that some 
machinery should be established to ensure "unity 
of command." This was by no means the first time 
that this question had been mooted. In quite early 
days in the war various tentative proposals had 
been put forward with the object of ensuring better 
control and greater unity of action amongst the 
forces of the Allies, but the political difficulties had 
always proved insuperable. 

Soon after Mr. Lloyd George became Prime Min- 
ister of Great Britain, a serious attempt was made 
to reach a practical solution at a conference be- 
tween the French and British Governments held at 



The Last Four Months 



Calais in February, 1917, and for the great offensive 
campaign planned for the spring of that year on the 
Western Front the French Commander-in-chief, Gen- 
eral Nivelle, was given supreme direction of the Allied 
strategy on the Western Front. Unfortunately, 
the failure of General Nivelle's campaign gave a 
set-back to "unity of command", and encouraged 
those who were opposed to it in the belief that it was 
not desirable to place the army of one nation directly 
under the command of the general of another. It 
was not then recognised that there was a very 
important difference between entrusting the supreme 
command to the Commander-in-chief of one army, 
whose mind and thoughts must necessarily be chiefly 
concerned with his own men and his own front, and 
placing it in the hands of one man who could stand 
back and look upon the front as a whole, free from 
the burden of the special charge of any one part of 
it. Also there was the question of finding the one 
man. Nivelle had failed, Joffre was on the shelf, 
and Foch was still under the shadow of his failure 
to take the Vimy Ridge in 1915. Thus, in spite of 
the recommendations of the Allied generals, nothing 
was done until the disaster to the Italian Army at 
Caporetto produced a crisis. 

Mr. Lloyd George, with his usual energy in an 
emergency, then proposed that a conference should 
be held between the British, French, and Italian 
Governments for the purpose of establishing an 
Allied organisation for the better control of the war. 

4 



What Went Before 



That conference was held in November, 1917, at 
Rapallo, on the Italian frontier, and it was then that 
the Supreme War Council, commonly known as the 
Versailles Council, was established. One of the 
objects of that step was to put the conferences of 
the Allied statesmen on a surer and more business- 
like basis than had up till then existed. Before 
the Versailles Council was instituted the Allied 
Governments used to confer at irregular intervals 
when they had important questions to discuss, but 
there was no organisation available to prepare 
beforehand the business for such meetings or to 
supervise the execution of the decisions which were 
reached. For these reasons the Versailles Council 
supplied an obvious need and was a step in the right 
direction ; but it did not and could not provide the 
means of exercising effective military command. 
In the first place the Council had no executive 
authority; it could only advise. In the second 
place the military representatives who formed the 
main part of the permanent organisation of the 
Council were each of them responsible to their own 
Governments, and had to refer back all important 
questions for the instructions of those Governments. 
Therefore decisions could only be reached slowly and 
after discussion, whereas in war it is essential that 
military decisions should be taken quickly and in 
accordance with one clear policy. The military side 
of the Versailles organisation was of value in collect- 
ing and bringing together information from each of 

5 



The Last Four Months 



the Allied armies. This enabled it to tender general 
advice as to the policy to be followed several months 
ahead, but it was quite incapable of dealing with 
day-to-day emergencies or of issuing orders to the 
Allied Commanders-in-chief. 

After the Versailles Council was established at 
Rapallo Mr. Lloyd George came home through 
Paris, where he made the famous speech in which 
he commented scathingly on the conduct of the 
war by the Allies. He asserted that each of the 
weaker members of the Alliance had been sacrificed 
in turn, while France and Great Britain were knock- 
ing their heads against what he termed the impene- 
trable barrier in the West. This speech aroused a 
great deal of criticism. That criticism was mainly 
of two kinds. There were those who realised that 
the Versailles Council did not provide for the danger 
which was facing us, that it did not, in fact, produce 
effective "unity of command." These critics were 
not opposed to "unity of command", but were op- 
posed to what they regarded as an inadequate meas- 
ure. The second group of critics was opposed to 
the Versailles Council because they were suspicious 
of any weakening of the control of Parliament over 
the Army, and they regarded an attempt to place 
the military forces of the Allies under an international 
organisation as a blow at the sovereign rights of the 
people. This group may be regarded as composed 
of out and out opponents of "unity of command" 
in any form. A good deal of confusion was caused 

6 



What Went Before 



by lumping these two bodies of critics together and 
by classing the many soldiers who desired "unity 
of command", but refused to recognise the Versailles 
Council as a practical military organisation, with 
those who were opposed to "unity of command" 
mainly for political reasons. 

While these discussions were going on the 
Germans were acting, and from the beginning of 
November onward they were moving troops from 
the Russian to the French front as fast as their 
trains could carry them. It was calculated that the 
Germans would be able to increase their strength 
on the Western Front between the beginning of 
November and the end of April by not less than a 
million and a half of men, and that they would be 
able to bring over a very large number of aeroplanes 
and heavy guns which they would no longer require 
on the Eastern Front. In these circumstances the 
military authorities of the Allies began pressing their 
Governments for more effective measures to meet the 
coming blow, and amongst those measures there was 
a demand for something better calculated to ensure 
"unity of command" than the Versailles Council. 
Keen observers in the United States of America, 
standing at a greater distance from the war and able 
to take a calmer and more general view of the whole 
vast conflict, had long been insisting on the need for 
really effective unified control, and at the time of 
the Rapallo conference the United States Govern- 
ment had proposed that the Versailles Council 

7 



The Last Four Months 



should be vested with executive authority. The 
French Government was frankly in favour of the 
appointment of a generalissimo, but, as this office 
would naturally fall to a French General, there 
was some reluctance to appear to force it upon an 
ally and Mr. Lloyd George was not ready to go 
so far. 

This, then, was the direction in which matters 
were moving at the beginning of 1918, when a con- 
ference was held at Versailles to consider the Allied 
plan of campaign for that year. At that conference 
it was decided to form an Executive Military Council, 
composed of a French, a British, an American and 
an Italian general, with General Foch as chairman, 
and that this body should be given authority to 
coordinate the strategy of the Allied Commanders- 
in-chief, to create a general reserve to be under its 
control, and to employ that reserve in accordance 
with the needs of the situation. 

The institution of this body produced another crisis, 
for the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, 
Sir William Robertson, objected that no committee 
could exercise effective command, and he asked to 
be permitted to resign rather than to work with it. 
The British Government offered him the alternative 
of becoming the British representative on the Execu- 
tive Council or of remaining as Chief of the Staff 
and working with the Executive Council. Sir 
William Robertson replied that, as he did not be- 
lieve there could be an efficient military organisation, 

8 



What Went Before 



he could not work with it in either capacity, and his 
resignation was accordingly accepted. 

These various events all produced the impression 
that British soldiers were in general opposed to 
"unity of command." In fact, however, many of 
them had long been working hard to find some 
solution of the difficulties which stood in the way of 
the realisation of what they regarded as a necessary 
measure. The majority of them were, however, 
certainly opposed to what they considered to be an 
ineffective compromise. The history of war teaches 
that committees have never been able to command, 
that they lead invariably to delay and compromise, 
and these things are fatal in war. The Austrian 
Aulic Council and the Dutch Field Deputies of the 
War of the Spanish Succession have been deservedly 
held up to ridicule by all history, and most soldiers 
were whole-heartedly opposed to proposals which ap- 
peared to savour of the repetition of such ill-advised 
measures. However, the length of the war, its 
enormous cost in life and treasure, the many failures 
of the Allied generals, and the fact that the hopes 
which they had expressed had been very rarely 
fulfilled, all tended to confirm the statesmen in 
their view that what was needed was more effective 
political control. A single Commander-in-chief 
would naturally possess a position of far greater 
authority even in his own country than would a 
committee, while the influence of a foreign Govern- 
ment upon the Commander-in-chief who commanded 

9 



The Last Four Months 



their troops would be very limited indeed. When 
to those who held these views was added the influence 
of those who looked with suspicion upon "unity of 
command" as constitutionally an unsound measure 
there were very strong forces arrayed on behalf of 
the compromise. So as the crisis approached, the 
supreme direction of the military forces of the Allied 
and Associated Powers in the Western theatres of 
war was in the hands of a polyglot committee, each 
member of which was responsible to a separate 
Government, and immediately this committee set to 
work its clumsy machinery began to creak. 

Then suddenly the blow came. On March 21 
forty German divisions were flung against the four- 
teen divisions of the British Fifth Army, which was 
driven back. By March 25 there appeared to be 
great danger that the Germans would succeed in 
capturing Amiens and in separating the British from 
the French army. By that time almost the whole 
of the British reserves had been drawn into the fight, 
and Sir Douglas Haig did not feel that he was strong 
enough to ensure the safety of both Amiens and of 
the Channel ports, while General Petain, was doubt- 
ful whether he could send Sir Douglas Haig sufficient 
troops to make Amiens safe and at the same time 
secure his own front and cover Paris. 

It was a grim crisis, probably the most serious 
of all the many crises with which the Allies had been 
faced in the course of the war. It happened that at 
this time Lord Milner, then Secretary of State for 

10 



What Went Before 



war, and General Sir Henry Wilson, the new Chief 
of the Imperial General Staff, were in France, having 
gone there to report to the British Government and 
to concert with the French Government in such 
measures as seemed best in the emergency. Sir 
Douglas Haig and his generals were naturally fully 
occupied with the military situation, and it was 
arranged for their convenience that a conference 
should be held at the little town of DouUens upon 
March 26. That conference was attended by M. 
Poincare, the President of the French Republic, 
M. Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France, M. 
Loucheur, the French Minister of Munitions, who 
represented the French Government, Lord Milner, 
who represented the British Government, Sir 
Douglas Haig and the four Army Commanders of 
the British army. Sir Henry Wilson, General 
Petain, and General Foch. 

When he was presenting the b^ton of Marshal 
of France to General Foch, M. Poincare told us that 
a conversation held in the garden of the house at 
DouUens in which the conference was held had con- 
vinced him that the baton was coming to Foch. 
The Executive Council of generals had, as had been 
anticipated, proved to be too slow and cumbrous to 
deal with a real emergency, and already at this early 
stage it was in a state of suspended animation and 
had to be replaced promptly by something more 
adequate. In fact, the situation was so serious that 
immediate action had to be taken. There was no 

11 



The Last Four Months 



time to refer back to the Allied Governments for 
authority and approval, and in that day of stress 
common sense prevailed. Political difficulties 
vanished, and General Foch was placed in supreme 
control of the Allied armies on the Western Front. 

Even then our Government was a little frightened 
of calling a spade a spade, and was at pains to ex- 
plain that Foch had not been appointed Generalis- 
simo ; but both the soldiers and the public hailed the 
DouUens decision with such enthusiasm and with such 
complete disregard of the niceties of official terminol- 
ogy, that after some further discussion and some 
skilful and tactful handling of the position by 
M. Clemenceau, Foch, on April 14, was nominated 
Commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in France 
and Belgium. 

It has often been asked who was mainly 
responsible for the appointment of General Foch. 
There is no question but that Mr. Lloyd George 
worked for "unity of command." The difficulty 
with him was that he did not understand fully the 
essential conditions of military command, and that 
for the sake of political considerations he was pre- 
pared to be content with something which fell short 
of military necessity. It is also certainly the case 
that the Government of the United States desired 
to achieve "unity of command", and that their 
influence was a most potent factor in bringing about 
the result which was eventually achieved. The con- 
ference at DouUens had been assembled in such 

12 



What Went Before 



haste that there was no time to obtain the presence 
of General Pershing, who was down in the south at 
Chaumont. Immediately General Pershing heard of 
the decision of the conference he wrote to General 
Foch his well-known letter of March 28 offering the 
new Generalissimo every man he had available. 
There never was any doubt but that the decision 
would be cordially welcomed and approved both by 
the statesmen and the generals of the United States, 
though in point of fact neither were represented 
when the decision was reached. This decision was 
probably mainly due to the influence at the con- 
ference of March 26 of M. Clemenceau, who had 
been quietly preparing the way for the appoint- 
ment of a generalissimo. Lord Milner and Sir 
Douglas Haig. 

There were many rumours at the time that Sir 
Douglas Haig and the British generals looked askance 
at the appointment of General Foch, but they were 
absolutely devoid of any foundation in fact. Gen- 
eral Foch's appointment was welcomed immediately 
by both Sir Douglas Haig and by his Army Com- 
manders, and there has been no better example of 
cooperation in war than that between Sir Douglas 
Haig and Marshal Foch. 

But, when all is said and done, the man who 
brought about "unity of command" was Luden- 
dorff. It was the emergency created by his great 
drive upon either side of the Somme which produced 
clear thinking and prompt decisions. Bos well tells of 

13 



The Last Four Months 



Doctor Johnson that when some unusually sagacious 
remark made by a criminal under sentence of death 
was reported to the Doctor he said : "Depend upon 
it, sir, that a man concentrates his mind marvellously 
when he is condemned to death." And so it was at 
DouUens on March 26. Ludendorff had dealt a 
deadly blow to the Allies, and under the menace of 
that blow the gentlemen assembled in the little town 
of Doullens concentrated their minds marvellously 
and took what was probably the most momentous 
decision made during the course of the great war, 
while those who had been hesitating on the bank 
found, when the plunge was taken, that the waters 
were not so cold as they had looked. 

I have spoken of Ludendorff as the controlling 
mind at German Headquarters. In the middle of 
the campaign of 1916 Falkenhayn, whose plans for 
the capture of Verdun had failed ignominiously, was 
removed from his position as Chief of the Great 
General Staff, and Hindenburg, with Ludendorff as 
his first assistant, was brought over from the Russian 
front to succeed him at Great Headquarters. The 
pair had not been there very long before it became 
clear that Hindenburg was little more than a figure- 
head and Ludendorff was de facto chief of the Ger- 
man war organisation. Hindenburg had gained 
the deep gratitude of the Berliners by his great 
victory of Tannenberg, won at a time when they 
were trembling in their shoes at the Russian invasion 
of East Prussia. We built high hopes upon the 

14 



What Went Before 



Russian "steam roller", and during the first months 
of the war the German public regarded it as being 
as formidable as we did. They were never easy in 
their minds until the Russians were driven back, and 
when this result was achieved they contrasted Hin- 
denburg's performances — with armies composed at 
first largely of second-rate troops, and the manner 
in which he restored the military efficiency of their 
feeble Austrian ally — with the failure of their 
generals in the West, who, though they had the 
pick of the German army at their disposal, had not 
achieved victory. 

Hindenburg's square head, his burly figure, his 
strong character, his contempt of the arts of peace, 
of which many stories were in circulation, made him 
an admirable embodiment of Prussian militarism, a 
living exponent of the gospel of might is right which 
the German people had adopted with enthusiasm. 
He provided the Kaiser with just the personality 
needed at Great Headquarters to keep the war fever 
in the Fatherland at boiling point. Ludendorff, 
who did his work at the office desk and was first and 
foremost a military thinker, could never make the 
same appeal to the popular imagination as did his 
chief. The pair, therefore, made an excellent com- 
bination. The Germans have always been good at 
such combinations, at providing the strong per- 
sonality or the royal personage with just the 
right brain. The classic example is that of Bliicher 
and Gneisenau in the closing years of the Napo- 

15 



The Last Four Months 



Iconic wars. Bliicher was then the personality, 
Gneiscnau the brain. Both of them came to Eng- 
land for the fetes which followed the peace of 
1815, and it is told of Bliicher that he then made 
a bet in a London drawing-room that he was the 
only man in the room who could kiss his own head. 
He won his wager by walking up to Gneisenau and 
giving him a smacking kiss on both cheeks. I 
doubt if Hindenburg were ever so frank as Bliicher, 
but the relations between him and Ludendorff 
were very much those of their predecessors of one 
hundred years before. 

By placing the supreme control of the Allied 
armies in the West in the hands of Foch, one of the 
essential preparations to meet the German menace 
was completed just in time to prevent disaster, but 
it was already too late to take those others which 
might have saved us from such shocks as caused us 
to tremble for our safety. At the end of 1917 the 
man power of France, in the fourth year of the fierce 
struggle in which she had, until the summer of 1916, 
borne the brunt of the fighting, was approaching 
exhaustion, and the French Government was no 
longer able to keep up its forces on the Western 
Front at full strength. The British army was wearied 
by the campaign in Flanders, and was grievously 
disappointed that the brilliant promise of the tank 
attack at Cambrai in November had ended in one 
more check. Both we and our French Allies had 
had to weaken materially our forces on the Western 

16 



What Went Before 



Front in order to bring help to our friends in the 
Southern theatre of war. The collapse of Russia was 
definite and complete, and German divisions were 
streaming from the Eastern to the Western Front. 
It had become a certainty that early in 1918 we 
should be confronted in France and Flanders by 
almost the full military power of Germany. The 
one bright spot in the picture was the arrival of the 
first American divisions in France, but there was 
little prospect that America would be able to solve 
the vast problem of creating armies and transporting 
them three thousand miles across the Atlantic in time 
to make her strength felt in France before the late 
summer. Prudence therefore demanded that we 
British should do everything that was possible to 
increase our forces there. 

AUenby's victory at Gaza and Beersheba and his 
brilliant pursuit ending in the capture of Jerusalem 
had disorganised the Turkish army, preparing near 
Aleppo under German leadership for the recapture 
of Baghdad, and had made our position in Asia 
secure. Two British divisions had been moved 
from Salonika and a third, composed largely of Ter- 
ritorial battalions brought from India, had been cre- 
ated in Egypt to reinforce Allenby for the campaign 
in which he broke through the Turkish lines on the 
southern frontier of Palestine. His artillery and 
aircraft had also been increased, and later a veteran 
Indian division had been moved from Mesopotamia 
to Egypt, while the Indian cavalry regiments which 

17 



The Last Four Months 



had been serving in France were also sent there. 
Allenby's force was, therefore, very considerably 
stronger than that which had for a long time pro- 
tected Egypt by covering the routes across the Sinai 
desert. North of Jerusalem, in the hills of Judaea, 
it was much better placed than it had been opposite 
Gaza. On one flank lay the Mediterranean, on the 
other the Dead Sea, while east of the Dead Sea 
spread the desert, of which our Arab friends were 
daily gaining more effective control. In March, 
1918, Allenby had under his command an army of 
three moiuited divisions, one mounted brigade, and 
eight infantry divisions of an approximate strength 
of 170,000 men, of whom about 150,000 were white 
troops and 20,000 native troops. In India Sir 
Charles Monro's expansion of the Indian army was 
well developed and a steady stream of Indian troops 
for service in Palestine was assured. We should, 
therefore, have incurred no risk whatever in the 
East by sending Haig at the beginning of 1918 a 
considerable reinforcement of white troops from 
Palestine. Not a man, however, was moved from 
the East to reinforce Haig until after the German 
blow had fallen and our armies had suffered the most 
serious reverse which befell us during the whole 
course of the war. 

In January, 1918, the fighting strength of our 
army in France had been much diminished as a result 
of the prolonged fighting which had begun at the 
end of July, 1917, in the attack on the Flanders 

18 



What Went Before 



ridges, and had not ended till the German counter- 
attack at Cambrai had been checked, well on in 
November. Hardly a battalion, a battery, or a 
squadron had its full complement of men. This had 
been expected, and indeed it was a normal experience 
of the war on the Western Front, for while great 
battles were in progress the losses exceeded the flow 
of drafts from home. The period during which hard 
fighting took place on the British front normally 
lasted from March to November and consequently 
at the end of the year the fighting strength of the 
army was usually at its lowest. During the winter 
and early spring the conditions of weather and of 
ground put a stop to operations on a grand scale, 
with the result that the losses were comparatively 
small ; this then was the time to bring the army up 
to strength in preparation for the campaign which 
might be expected in the spring. It was necessary 
that the preparations for filling the gaps in the ranks 
should be made a long time ahead, for it took from 
four to five months to train a recruit to take his place 
in the ranks in France, and the process of calling him 
up often took as long as from two to three months 
from the time he received his first notice. Therefore, 
arrangements for filling up the ranks during the early 
months of the year should have been well in hand 
by the previous summer. 

In December, 1916, the ranks of the fighting 
troops had been heavily depleted by the long and 
bitter struggles of the Somme and the Ancre, but by 

19 



The Last Four Months 



April, 1917, on the eve of the battle of Arras, the 
ranks were again full, and Haig had been provided 
with considerable additional reinforcements ; in fact 
at that time the fighting strength of our army was 
almost at the highest point it ever reached. We 
then still had divisions at home which could be sent 
out to reinforce the army in France, and were able 
to bring back troops from Egypt because by ad- 
vancing into the Sinai desert and gaining control 
of the wells, which provided the only water avail- 
able for a force advancing to attack Egypt, we 
could defend that country much more econom- 
ically than if we held the long line of the Suez 
Canal. In 1918 we had in England no divisions 
which could be sent to Haig, and it was therefore 
the more necessary, in view of the danger which 
threatened us and of the fact that five divisions had 
been sent from our army in France to Italy, to bring 
back to France every man who could be spared from 
the more distant theatres of war, and to make our 
ranks up to their full strength. Yet none of these 
measures was taken. In March, 1918, Sir Douglas 
Haig's fighting strength was weaker by over 42,000 
men than it had been on January 1, 1917 ; there had 
been some increase in artillery, a considerable in- 
crease in aircraft, tanks and machine-guns, and a very 
large increase in labour formations both British and 
coloured, but unarmed labourers and Chinese coolies 
were not the kind of reinforcements Sir Douglas Haig 
needed to fight Germans, though they were invaluable 

20 



What Went Before 



to him for other purposes. His infantry — -the es- 
sential arm, whether for offense or defense — was 
weaker by more than 100,000 men than it had been 
at the beginning of 1917. A comparison of the 
strengths on the eve of the battle of March, 1918, 
with those in January, 1917, is, however, misleading, 
for it is a comparison of a period when the ranks 
ought to have been full with a period when they were 
naturally empty; the only fair comparison is be- 
tween the position in March, 1918, and in March, 
1917. On the latter date the rifle and sabre strength 
of the army in France, that is, the number of men 
available for duty in the trenches, was greater by 
180,000 men than it was at the former. 

During the early months of 1918 the drafts sent 
out from home fell so far short of Sir Douglas Haig's 
requirements that it was impossible for him to main- 
tain his army any longer at the strength at which 
it had been during the previous autumn. Accord- 
ingly, between the middle of January and the middle 
of February, three battalions out of the thirteen in 
each of the British divisions were broken up, and 
the men in them were used to take the place of drafts 
from home to fill up the ranks of the remaining bat- 
talions. This measure, which was the consequence 
of the failure of the Government to provide the 
drafts, caused a drastic change in the organisation 
and tactics of our infantry at a critical period when 
there was no time to accustom commanders and 
troops to the new conditions. Worse still, it adver- 

21 



The Last Four Months 



tised our weakness to the army, and was the reverse 
of encouraging to men who were preparing to meet 
a great attack. Nor was this all. Owing to the 
decline of the strength of the French army the 
French Government became more and more insistent 
that we should take over a longer stretch of the 
front. Petain at this time thought it extremely 
probable that the German attack would be directed 
against him, and he did not feel himself able to meet 
such an attack unless we relieved some of his troops. 
When the length of front held by us and by the 
French was compared it appeared at first sight that 
France was bearing a very undue share of the burden, 
but the burden borne by troops in trench warfare 
cannot be estimated merely by the length of the 
line they hold. The French, for example, held a 
very long line in Alsace and Lorraine, where for 
months on end a serious bombardment was almost 
unknown, and the trenches could be very lightly 
held, because the Germans on this front were not in 
strength and showed no disposition to attack. On 
the other hand, the enemy had always kept a large 
proportion of his troops in the West opposite the 
British front, while the climate and soil of Flanders 
made this, for many months in the year, one of the 
most exacting parts of the whole line. A still more 
important consideration was that only in a compara- 
tively small part of the French front would loss of 
ground bring with it very serious consequences, 
while the British front north of the Somme covered 



What Went Before 



so narrow a strip of country in front of the Channel 
ports, that almost every yard of it was precious. 
However, after prolonged negotiations between the 
two Governments, and after the question had been 
referred to the new Versailles organisation for exam- 
ination, the French arguments prevailed, and Haig, 
in order to meet the wishes of the British Government, 
agreed with Petain to take over an additional twenty- 
eight miles of front and to extend his front south of 
the Somme as far as the Oise. This extension made 
the length of our line 130 miles, the greatest length 
of front we had ever held, while the number of rifles 
available to hold it was approximately equal to that 
in March, 1916, when the length of our front 
was about eighty miles and the Germans still had 
great armies on the Russian front. 

The new front taken over from the French fell 
to our Fifth Army, which, though it was urgently in 
need of rest, had in the few weeks preceding the 
German attack to familiarise itself with fresh ground 
and to work incessantly at the erection of defenses. 
Actually then our preparations for meeting the threat 
which the Germans held over us were that we had 
agreed with our Allies to invest the supreme com- 
mand in the hands of an executive committee, we 
had abolished two of Haig's cavalry divisions, had 
reduced the number of infantry battalions at his dis- 
posal by close on twenty-five per cent., had made an 
important alteration in the organisation of our in- 
fantry, and had at the same time increased our liabil- 

23 



The Last Four Months 



ities by taking over twenty-eight miles of new front, 
this new front being not less important than our 
positions in Flanders, for it covered the roads to 
Amiens and Paris. 

It will naturally be asked how it came about that 
we did not do more to prepare for the great German 
attack, which was expected long before it took place. 
Mr. Lloyd George was confirmed by the result of 
the third battle of Ypres in his opinion that the 
position on the Western Front was one of stalemate. 
We and the French had made attempt after attempt 
to break through the German trenches when our 
numerical superiority over the enemy had been 
greater than his was expected to be when he had 
brought his troops across from Russia. In April, 
1917, on the eve of General Nivelle's offensive, it 
had been calculated that the Allies had on the West- 
ern Front a superiority of 600,000 rifles and 5,000 
guns. In the spring of 1918 it was estimated that 
the Germans might have a superiority of 300,000 
rifles and that their preponderance in artillery would 
not be considerable. Mr. Lloyd George believed 
that the whole experience of the war on the Western 
Front had shown that the Germans would require 
a far greater numerical superiority than they ap- 
peared likely to possess in order to endanger our 
position. He doubted if the Germans would make 
the attempt, but was quite certain that the Allied 
forces in France and Belgium were strong enough 
to stop them if they did. He believed that victory 



What Went Before 



could only be won by taking the way round, by 
knocking down Germany's props. He had held 
this view from the early days of 1915, when the 
trench barrier was first established between the 
North Sea and the Swiss frontier. He had first ad- 
vocated reinforcing Serbia with the object of attack- 
ing Austria and bringing in the other Balkan States 
on our side. Then, when he failed to carry his argu- 
ments in favour of that enterprise, he had proposed 
to attack Austria through Italy. Both these opera- 
tions were now out of the question ; the Allied armies 
in these theatres could only be reinforced to the 
necessary extent at the expense of the Western Front, 
and if he did not think it necessary to strengthen that 
front he was not rash enough to weaken it ; but by 
leaving AUenby the troops he had in Palestine, and 
by reinforcing him from India, he believed that it 
would be possible to defeat Turkey, who was very 
shaky. Victories in Asia Minor would, he hoped, 
encourage the Allied peoples to hold on during 1918, 
while America was preparing her armies and shipping 
them to France, and it would be time enough to 
consider in 1919 whether it was worth while to defeat 
the German armies in the West. He had to provide 
labour for the munitions factories, for the coal mines, 
and for the shipyards to meet the submarine menace. 
He could only obtain the soldiers needed to keep our 
troops in France up to strength by raising the age 
limit for the draft, and he dreaded the political 
ejffect of doing this if he left Ireland exempt, while 

25 



The Last Four Months 



the problem of forcing conscription on Ireland was 
one which he did not care to face. He considered 
that by instituting the Versailles Council and its 
later development, the Executive Military Com- 
mittee of the Council, he had counterbalanced the 
advantage which the Germans had in the West in 
a single homogenous army under one commander, 
and he refused both to meet the demands of the 
soldiers for men to fill the depleted ranks in France 
and to transfer troops from Palestine to France. 
He was, in fact, sincerely convinced that the barrier 
in the West was impenetrable alike by us and by 
the Germans. 

Though the procession of German troops from 
East to West had begun in November and continued 
steadily throughout the winter and spring, it was not 
until March that Ludendorff's fighting strength on 
the Western Front was approximately equal numer- 
ically to that of the Allies. It is not possible, 
however, to estimate correctly the power of opposing 
armies merely by counting heads, and Ludendorff 
had many factors in his favour which added mate- 
rially to his strength. For a long time before he 
opened the campaign of 1918 there had been little 
or no fighting on the Eastern Front, which became 
for him a vast rest camp and training centre in 
which his men could be prepared for work elsewhere. 
Thus while our men and the enemy opposed to them 
were engaged in desperate and exhausting fighting, 
large German forces were quietly preparing elsewhere 

26 



What Went Before 



for their next effort. The collapse of Russia and the 
failure of the 1917 campaign to yield any decisive 
results had thrown us on the defensive, and had 
given Ludendorff the opportunity, of which he skil- 
fully took full advantage, of playing upon the fears 
of the Allied commanders and of keeping each of 
them under threat of attack. Further, in March, 1918, 
Ludendorff had large reserves of trained men still 
in the East, ready to come across. Actually between 
March 1 and the end of May, when his strength 
was at its highest, his forces were increased by twenty 
divisions and a large amount of heavy artillery. 
Therefore Ludendorff had an important reinforce- 
ment at hand in March, and the Allies had no cor- 
responding reserve which could be ready until long 
after the German commander had his on the spot. 
The extreme advocates of the policy of seeking 
victory by the way round failed from the first to 
recognise that the German forces on the Russian 
front were a potential reserve for their armies in 
France, and that at any time from the beginning of 
1915 onwards the German leaders might have re- 
versed the process which they carried through after 
their defeat in the first battle of Ypres, have stood 
on the defensive in the East and sent all troops not 
necessary for defense there to the West. Even be- 
fore the U-boats, Gothas and Zeppelins became 
as dangerous as they subsequently were, it was 
clear that, if the Germans reached Calais and Bou- 
logne, Great Britain would be in danger of starvation 

27 



The Last Four Months 



and of invasion, and that her army in France would 
have a very precarious line of communications with 
the Motherland. 

The importance of protecting Paris needed no 
discussion. In September, 1914, Joffre, backed by 
the French Government, had made all possible pre- 
parations for continuing the war even if the capital 
fell to the enemy, but the moral effect which the 
success of a second German attack on Paris might 
have had is incalculable, and the safety of Paris ought 
not in any circumstances to have been risked. It is 
an old and well-established maxim of strategy that 
before launching out upon an offensive enterprise a 
general must look to the safety of the vitals both of 
his army and of his country. The Channel ports and 
Paris were the vitals of Great Britain and of France. 

The moment these were seriously threatened the 
Government perforce took in haste the measures 
which might have been carried through at leisure. 
The application of the Military Service Acts was ex- 
tended, drafts were rushed out from home, and every 
British soldier who could be spared from the East 
was brought to France. Just as the Germans forced 
"unity of command" upon us, so they compelled us 
to discard the errors in our strategy. But it is now 
time for a word as to the events which brought these 
things to pass. 

By the middle of February, 1918, it had become 
apparent that the Germans were pushing forward 
their preparations for a great offensive with all 

28 



What Went Before 



energy, and there were already indications that they 
intended to attack the British right, held by our Fifth 
and Third Armies. Ludendorff was, however, much 
too skilful to confine his preparations to one part of 
the front and these pointed to the possibility that the 
attack on our right might be a preliminary to a greater 
blow against our line farther north, or against the 
French to the south. The northern portion of our 
front was but fifty miles distant from Calais and 
sixty miles from Boulogne ; therefore if the Germans 
had broken through even to a depth of twenty-five 
miles we should have been in dire straits, for they 
would then have gained possession of the hill of Cassel 
which dominates the Flanders flats northwards to 
the coast on either side of Dunkerque, would have 
forced the Belgians to fall back, could have shelled 
and bombed the harbours and have hemmed the 
Allied left flank into a position from which issue 
would have been well-nigh impossible. In the south 
we had more elbow room, for our front between St. 
Quentin and the Oise was over ninety miles from the 
coast, and could, in case of emergency, be more 
quickly reinforced by the French than could our line 
in Flanders. 

Sir Douglas Haig, therefore, felt bound to keep 
the greater part of such reserves as he had at his dis- 
posal north of the Somme. Gough's Fifth Army 
held the line from our point of junction with the 
French on the Oise not far from La Fere to Gauzeau- 
court, southwest of Cambrai, a distance of about 

29 



The Last Four Months 



forty-two miles. On the whole of this front Gough 
had fourteen divisions and three cavalry divisions, 
eleven of his divisions being in the line, and the 
remainder in reserve, each of his divisions in the line 
holding on an average 6,750 yards of front. Byng's 
Third Army on Gough's left held a front of about 
twenty-seven miles with fifteen divisions, eight of 
them being in the line and seven in reserve, the 
average length of front held by each division being 
about 4,700 yards. Gough's liabilities, therefore, 
were very considerably greater than Byng's, and the 
reserves of the Fifth Army were much weaker than 
those of the Third, while, as it turned out, Gough had 
to bear by far the greater weight of the German 
attack. 

Throughout the winter Ludendorff had been plan- 
ning, with the method and care of a trained German 
mind, how to achieve his object and to solve the pro- 
blem of breaking through the trench barrier, a pro- 
blem to which all the generals on the West, on both 
sides, had hitherto found no answer. All were by 
this time agreed that the method of attack by means 
of a great and protracted bombardment, followed^ by 
an infantry assault pressed through upon one part 
of the front, was a failure. The immense and lengthy 
preparation which this form of battle involved made 
any surprise impossible, as sooner or later the de- 
fender's reserves came up, and the battle ended in a 
slogging match in which the assailant gained little 
return for very heavy losses. Ludendorff probably 

30 



What Went Before 



realised that it would be out of the question to keep 
all his preparations for attack secret. No camou- 
flage could altogether conceal from our air observers 
that something was afoot and some information 
would certainly be elicited from the prisoners taken 
in the daily skirmishes of trench warfare. But he 
conceived that it would be possible to deceive us as 
to the weight of the blow which he meant to deliver, 
and to achieve some measure of surprise by keeping 
the great part of his artillery and the bulk of his 
attacking divisions at a distance from the battlefield 
until the last possible moment. This method had 
the double advantage of keeping us in uncertainty 
both as to the strength of the attack and as to whether 
it would be made in more than one place, for, in the 
weeks preceding the battle, he placed his reserves 
so that they could be moved as readily against our 
northern front, or even against the French front, as 
against our right flank. 

He decided then to have no long preliminary bom- 
bardment, which would have given us a definite 
indication of his plans, and, as we had found to our 
cost, would so destroy the surface of the ground and 
break up the roads and the railways as to make it a 
matter of great difficulty to get the reserves forward 
when they were needed. He also decided to bring 
up his attacking divisions at the last moment by train 
and by rapid marches under cover of darkness. This 
was the essence of his plan and the feature in which it 
differed most from other attacks which had been tried 

31 



The Last Four Months 



in the West. In the details of its execution there was 
also much that v/as new. Ludendorff and his staff 
had studied very carefully all the previous attacks 
which had been carried through both by us and by the 
French, and he found that opportunities had often 
been missed because parts of the attacking line had 
been checked at strong points held resolutely by the 
defenders and the remainder had waited for these to 
be reduced ; he also maintained that the progress of 
the Allied infantry had been delayed by what he 
held to be too frequent reliefs. He therefore deter- 
mined that as a principle he would follow up success 
wherever it was won, driving in at such weak points 
as he discovered, and that he would not delay his 
advance in order to overcome centres of resistance 
against which his progress was checked. In order 
to develop this method of attack to the utmost he 
devoted the winter to selecting from his army the 
best and bravest of his soldiers and putting them 
through a special form of training. These men, 
whom he called "storm troops", were to lead his 
attacks, with orders to press forward as far and as 
fast as possible, while they were given the assurance 
that where they were successful they would be im- 
mediately supported by the reserve. He impressed 
upon his infantry divisions that they must go forward 
to the utmost limits of their powers of endurance, 
without expecting relief, and he practised them in 
making long advances carrying food for several days. 
By March 19 Haig's Intelligence Department had 



What Went Before 



discovered that the Germans' preparations for attack 
on the Third and Fifth Armies were nearly complete, 
and it was anticipated that the battle would begin 
on March 20 or 21. The attack actually opened 
shortly before 5 a.m. on the twenty-first with a bom- 
bardment of the greatest intensity against the whole 
front held by those armies, while, in order to keep us 
in doubt till the last possible moment as to their in- 
tentions, the Germans simultaneously bombarded 
parts of our northern line and the French fronts on 
either side of Reims. For about five hours a perfect 
hurricane of shell was hurled against Gough's and 
Byng's defenses, and it has been stated by German 
officers that the rate of fire was so rapid that many 
of their guns became red-hot. Then, shortly before 
10 A.M., the German infantry advanced. This five- 
hour bombardment may be compared to our artillery 
preparation for the first battle of the Spmme, which 
lasted seven days. The battle had not been long 
in progress before it became clear that Ludendorff 
was throwing his whole weight against our right, and, 
therefore, though Haig had guessed accurately both 
the time and the place at which the attack would be 
made, Ludendorff had won the first move by getting 
all his reserves in motion first. This much was due 
to his skill, but he was also greatly favoured by for- 
tune. The early months of 1918 had been phenom- 
enally dry, but March 19 had been a day of drizzle 
sufficient to dampen the surface of the hard ground ; 
on the twentieth the sky had cleared and the sun had 

33 



The Last Four Months 



drawn up a dense blanket of fog which, on the twenty- 
first, enveloped the whole battlefield, with the result 
that in few places was it possible to see more than 
fifty yards. We often during the war created arti- 
ficial fogs and blanketed successfully the enemy's 
deadly machine-guns by means of smoke clouds, the 
preparation of which had cost us much time and 
trouble. Ludendorff was provided by nature with 
a more effective screen than we had ever been able to 
produce. 

Our system of defense was an adaptation of that 
which had been used by the Germans with consider- 
able success in the third battle of Ypres ; that is to 
say, it consisted, in the first place, of an outpost zone 
covering the area, which, as experience told us, would 
probably be most heavily bombarded by the enemy. 
This outpost zone was lightly held, and the troops in it 
were intended, after giving warning of the German ad- 
vance and delaying it to the best of their power, to fall 
back on the battle positions behind. The strength 
of these battle positions depended greatly upon 
the cross fire of guns and machine-guns, and upon a 
series of elaborate strong posts so placed that the 
garrisons of each could see under normal conditions 
the neighbours with whom they were to cooperate. 
This system, which later more than justified itself 
when there was no fog, was unsuitable when guns, 
machine-guns and infantry were blinded. The only 
answer to the fog was to strengthen the infantry hold- 
ing the trenches, but for this there were not men avail- 

34 



What Went Before 



able, unless they were taken from the already weak 
reserve. 

Nor was the fog the only stroke of fortune which 
favoured the Germans. Gough's front ran roughly 
north and south till it reached the River Oise, and 
then bent back southeastwards along the northern 
bank of the river. In this portion of its course the 
Oise runs through a wide and normally marshy valley, 
such as no great attacking force could cross in an 
ordinary spring. It had, therefore, not been expected 
that the German attack would include this sector, 
which was lightly held. In fact, one of the arguments 
which the French had put forward in order to induce 
us to extend our front so far south was that no large 
number of troops would be required to defend the 
Oise, where our line would be so strong naturally as 
to be impervious to attack. The Oise line had al- 
ways been regarded as a quiet sector. In order to 
economise troops, Gough had decided to hold this, ap- 
parently the least vulnerable part of his front, with a 
series of posts, and not to have a continuous line of 
defense. The dry weather, however, enabled the 
Germans to cross the marshes without difficulty, 
the fog allowed them to penetrate between the posts, 
often unobserved. The result of this was that the 
enemy were able to get behind our defenses further 
north and cut off the defenders. 

It is not my purpose to describe the struggle in 
detail. My object is to make clear the causes which 
led to the defeat of the Fifth Army and to show that 

35 



The Last Four Months 



they were beyond the control of the brave men of 
whom that army was composed. From the first day 
of the battle Ludendorff flung sixty-four divisions 
against the Third and Fifth Armies. Of these sixty- 
four at least forty attacked the fourteen divisions and 
three cavalry divisions of Gough's Fifth Army, while 
the remaining twenty-four fell upon Byng's fifteen 
divisions. It is, therefore, in no way surprising that 
the Fifth Army was overwhelmed. 

The news that it had been overwhelmed came as 
a rude shock to the public at home. It seemed in- 
conceivable that the Germans should have been able 
to break so completely through such elaborate de- 
fenses, manned by British troops, when we had, de- 
spite lavish supplies of guns and munitions and the 
incomparable valour of our men, only been able by 
continuous effort and at an appalling cost to achieve 
much smaller results. Wild stories were flying about 
of the breakdown of the Fifth Army, and it was 
whispered in the drawing-rooms of London that the 
men had not fought as they ought to have fought. 
In the confusion and uncertainty of retreat the true 
facts could not be discovered and made known, with 
the result that for long imputations rested upon the 
Fifth Army which were wholly contrary to the truth. 
Eager to find some silver lining to the cloud, the public 
fastened upon the glorious defense of the Third Army 
and contrasted it with Gough's apparent collapse. 

I have no desire to minimise in any way the splen- 
dour of the achievement of Byng's men, but I trust 

36 



What Went Before 



I have made it clear that the burden which Gough's 
troops had to bear was incomparably the greater. In 
the first stage of the battle very nearly twice as many 
German divisions attacked Gough as fell upon Byng. 
Each of Gough's divisions had on the average to hold 
nearly fifty per cent, more front than had Byng, while 
the Third Army reserves were nearly twice as strong 
as those of the Fifth, yet at the end of the first day's 
battle Gough's left, where the gallant 9th Division 
beat off all attacks, had given less ground than some 
of Byng's divisions farther north had been compelled 
to yield. 

By the evening of March 21 our battle positions 
had not been penetrated except on the extreme right, 
where the Germans had crossed the dried-up bed of 
the Oise, but during the night and the next morning 
the enemy, helped by the fog, had discovered three 
weak points in our front, and, true to Ludendorff's 
principle, had pressed his advantage at these points 
till the line crumbled. These were days of gallant 
and desperate fighting against overwhelming odds, 
passing all preconceived standards of endurance and 
of self-sacrifice. The garrisons of many of our works 
held out long after the enemy, pouring through gaps 
in our line, had swept beyond them and completely 
cut them off. As in the days of the crisis of the first 
battle of Ypres, cooks, signallers, servants and odd- 
job men of all kinds rallied round the headquarters of 
battalions and fought on long after hope of .support 
had gone. The Germans, surging past these devoted 

37 



The Last Four Months 



bands, which stood out here and there along the front 
like rocks surrounded by the incoming tide, pressed 
back Gough's right, and, as by the evening of the 
twenty-second he had thrown in all his available re- 
serves, and only one French division had as yet ar- 
rived to help him, he felt that there was no alterna-. 
tive but to fall back to the Somme. 

A bridgehead position had been prepared around 
Peronne on the east bank of the river, but there had 
been no time to complete the defenses along the river 
itself. When the troops arrived in their new posi- 
tions, to which they withdrew during the night, hard 
pressed by the enemy, they found only some rudi- 
ments of trenches with little or no wire in front of 
them. Many strange and baseless reports were 
circulated to account for this fact. It was said that 
Gough, being a cavalry general, had refused to 
allow his rear lines of defense to be wired, and had 
even ordered wire to be pulled up in order that the 
cavalry might have free scope. The fact is that 
the southern portion of Gough's front had only been 
taken over from the French about seven weeks before 
the German attack began. During the early part of 
the winter the French had been able to hold this por- 
tion of the front very lightly, so that the troops they 
had there were not sufl&ciently numerous to main- 
tain even the existing defenses in good condition, and 
they had made no attempt to construct the new works 
necessary to withstand a great German attack. The 
country had been devastated by the battles of 1916, 

88 



What Went Before 



the roads were in bad condition, there was no light 
railway system, the broad-gauge system was defec- 
tive, and, as all the villages had been gutted, there was 
no shelter for the troops. An immense amount of 
work had, therefore, to be done by the Fifth Army, 
the men labouring incessantly at the construction of 
defenses in the battle zone and at improving the 
defective communications. The sole reason why the 
line of the Somme was not fortified was that there had 
been neither time nor labour available for the purpose. 
Gough had early realised that it was very probable 
that he would not have the time he needed to com- 
plete his rear lines of defense, and in February had 
asked our Intelligence Department to use every de- 
vice at their disposal to cause the Germans to delay 
their attack. 

Owing to the difficulty of carrying out a uniform 
retreat to the Somme of the whole line in the dark, 
a gap occurred in our front in the neighbourhood of 
Ham, and Germans succeeded in getting across the 
river at that place. Although very elaborate prep- 
arations had been made for blowing up the Somme 
bridges, and the men and explosives for this work 
were on the spot, yet the enemy's artillery, following 
up our retreat closely, in a number of cases exploded 
the charges prematurely, and in others cut the leads 
and so prevented the complete destruction of the 
bridges. The Somme, like the Oise, was, in conse- 
quence of the abnormally dry winter, very low, and 
the enemy was able to cross at many places where in 

39 



The Last Four Months 



ordinary times the river would have been impassable. 
The result of this combination of untoward events 
was that by the night of March 25 the line of the 
Somme was already in the hands of the Germans on 
Gough's right, and the defense of the river farther 
north was seriously compromised. 

Meanwhile the enemy had been pressing Gough's 
left while it was falling back north of the Somme 
in conformity with the retreat of the centre of the 
Fifth Army behind the river, and the situation at 
the junction of the Third and Fifth Armies became 
critical. The Third Army, which during the twenty- 
third had repulsed repeated assaults by the enemy, 
in mass formation, and during that day had given 
very little ground, was consequently compelled to 
swing back its right across the Somme battlefields. 
During the twenty-second the Germans extended 
their gains west of the Somme against Gough's right, 
and on his left had seized the heights north of the 
river and west of Peronne. Both flanks of the de- 
fenders of the river line at and south of Peronne 
were thus endangered, and there was no help for 
it but to fall back again. 

The loss of the line of the Somme was a very 
serious matter, for the Germans now entered upon 
the zone in which were placed our depots, stores and 
hospitals. These had all to be abandoned or evacu- 
ated hastily, and consequently quantities of war 
material of all kinds fell into the enemy's hands ; 
much sujffering was caused to the sick and wounded, 

40 



What Went Before 



of whom numbers had to be left untended and with- 
out shelter alongside the railway lines in the rear 
until the hospital trains could pick them up; the 
telegraph and telephone systems were interrupted, 
and the difl&culties of organising defense increased as 
the danger grew. It was clear that the immediate 
object of the Germans was to reach Amiens and that 
their main attack was falling upon the Fifth Army. 
So, in order to allow Gough to devote his whole atten- 
tion to the enemy advancing south of the river, Sir 
Douglas Haig placed that portion of the Fifth Army 
which was north of the Somme under Byng, and it 
then became, a part of the Third Army. This new 
right of the Third Army was pressed back north of 
the Somme, and the Fifth Army south of the river, 
finding its flank exposed, had to continue its retreat. 
It was now the sixth day of the battle, March 26. 
The danger of the Germans reaching Amiens and 
driving in a wedge between the British and French 
armies was very nigh. Haig had ordered his last 
reserves to the point of danger, and it was doubtful 
whether Petain would be able to send the French 
reserves to the battlefield in time. It was, as I have 
said, in this emergency that the conference at 
Doullens appointed Foch to the supreme command, 
and by so doing inspired the weary leaders and their 
men, battling against great odds, with fresh con- 
fidence. Already, though they did not yet know it, 
the valour and endurance in adversity of our men was 
being rewarded, for the Germans, equally weary, 

41 



The Last Four Months 



could not sustain the momentum of their attack. Our 
airmen, who watched the long-drawn-out struggle 
from above, have described how, in its last stages, the 
infantry upon both sides were too exhausted to move, 
save at a slow walk, and would lie for hours opposite 
to each other without firing, having lost the energy to 
load and fire, save in a real emergency. Ludendorff 
had, as I have said, planned to get the last ounce out 
of his men and in order to avoid loss of time in reliefs 
had left them to fight on until sheer exhaustion made 
them almost impotent. He had hoped that before 
that stage of exhaustion was reached he would have 
driven a wide breach in our line, but he had not reck- 
oned with the doggedness of the British infantry- 
man, whose spirit kept him fighting long after he 
ought to have collapsed. The line, though badly bent; 
was still a line, held by battalions reduced to the size 
of companies, brigades to the strength of weak bat- 
talions, but still held. 

This was the state of affairs while Ludendorff was 
trying to get up fresh troops to the front and Foch 
was hurrying up the French reserves from the south 
to our aid, and it was then that an improvisation of 
Gough's gave just the time needed for our Allies to 
come up. He directed General Grant, his Chief En- 
gineer, to assemble every man he could collect from 
his training schools, his engineers and the odds and 
ends of troops employed in special jobs behind the 
army, and form them into a reinforcing force. Later, 
as the Chief Engineer was required for his proper 

42 



What Went Before 



duties, the command of this miscellaneous body was 
given to General Carey who happened to be free, and 
it became known to fame as Carey's Force. It was 
joined by Canadian and American railway con- 
struction engineers, who were engaged in laying 
railway lines in the neighbourhood of Amiens. 
These men, though but few of them had had any 
real military training, volunteered to fight, as had 
the American railway engineers who had fought 
with Byng's men when the Germans made their 
counter-attack at Cambrai in November, 1917, and 
were the first American soldiers to take part in 
battle on the Western front. With this exception 
this little band of Carey's consisted almost wholly 
of men included in the fighting strength of the Army, 
but, being hastily brought together, they lacked the 
equipment of an organised force. Nevertheless, this 
reinforcement, together with the skill and devotion 
of our cavalry, who, on our right, repeated in even 
more trying circumstances their achievements dur- 
ing the retreat from Mons, and with the aid of 
divisions brought up to Amiens from Gough's ex- 
treme right, as they were relieved by the French, 
just enabled the battered remnant of the Fifth Army 
to bar the direct road to Amiens until the arrival of 
the Australians from the north and of the French 
troops from the south once more established a firm 
barrier against the tide of the German invasion, and 
by the evening of March 28 the worst of the crisis was 
over, though the great battle was by no means ended. 

43 



The Last Four Months 



On that day the Germans made a desperate effort 
to drive in at Arras, an effort designed to force us 
out of the Vimy Ridge, one of the main pivots of our 
defense. This attack, which involved the right of 
Home's First Army as well as the left and centre 
of Byng's Third Army, was delivered by the enemy 
in great strength, but it failed disastrously. When 
it ended, the Germans had gained a portion only of 
our outpost positions, and our battle positions had 
everywhere resisted their assaults. This time there 
was no fog to help the enemy, and Haig's system 
of defense was completely successful. It is not 
too much to say that this costly repulse doomed 
Ludendorff's campaign to failure. 

We have the evidence of captured documents and 
of Ludendorff's statements in his "Reminiscences", 
that the chief object of this campaign was to separate 
the British from the French army, the capture of 
Amiens being only a means towards that end. The 
danger of the Germans realising this plan would 
have been much greater than it actually was had 
they managed to make a wide breach north of the 
Somme, for they would then have used that river 
between Peronne and Abbeville to hold off the 
French reinforcements coming up from the south, 
while they attempted to drive the British army 
into the sea, and, of course, the farther north the 
breach the longer it would take the French troops 
to reach the danger point. When one recalls how 
very near the Germans were to creating a real 

44 



What Went Before 



breacli south of the Somme and how the French 
reserves came up only just in time to prevent such a 
calamity, there is little difficulty in imagining how 
much greater the peril would have been had the 
Third Army given way and in appreciating the 
wisdom of Sir Douglas Haig's decision to keep the 
greater part of his very limited reserve north of 
the Somme. I believe it was the stout resistance 
of the Third Army upon March 23 and the retire- 
ment of the Fifth Army behind the Somme upon 
that day which induced Ludendorff to follow what 
he believed to be the line of least resistance and to 
strike for Amiens by the southern bank of the 
Somme. Then when he found that he could not 
overcome the resistance of the Fifth Army before 
the French came up, and realised that he would 
have to call a halt on the southern part of the battle- 
field to rest and relieve his exhausted men, he made 
the desperate attempt of March 28 to return to 
his first idea of creating such a breach north of 
the Somme as would enable him to roll up our line 
and force us back on the ports. From this second 
danger Byng's Third Army saved us. Checked on 
the northern battle-front, Ludendorff, on April 4, 
made one more attempt to reach Amiens by the 
southern route in a battle which lasted till the even- 
ing of the fifth ; but Foch's vigorous methods had 
already brought up sufficient French troops, and the 
great German effort to drive a wedge between the 
Allied armies had, for the time being, worn itself out. 

43 



The Last Four Months 



Hardly had one crisis passed before another arose. 
On April 9 the Germans attacked and overwhelmed 
the Portuguese holding a portion of the Flanders 
front to the south of Armentieres. Haig had greatly- 
weakened his forces in the north in order to find 
troops to save Amiens, and the divisions sent to the 
Somme had to some extent been replaced in Flanders 
by exhausted divisions withdrawn from that battle- 
field and hastily reconstituted with reinforcements 
sent out from England. Thus our men passed from 
one fiery trial to another. This Flanders battle had 
been considered and rejected by Ludendorff when 
he formed his original plan, but, finding that his 
troops on the Amiens front were checked, and 
that his Seventeenth Army, which had attacked 
Byng and Home, had been so severely handled 
as to be incapable, for a time, of further effort, he 
determined to revert to it and to drive for the 
Channel ports. 

By the evening of April 9 the Germans had forced 
their way across the River Lawe, midway between 
Armentieres and Bethune, and had made such progress 
as to endanger our hold upon both towns. Bethune 
was saved by the splendid defense of the 55th West 
Lancashire Division of its front about Festubert 
and Givenchy. Sir Douglas Haig mentions as one 
of the many gallant deeds performed by this division 
the story of a machine-gun which was kept in action, 
although the Germans had entered the rear compart- 
ment of the *' pill-box" from which it was firing, the 

46 



What Went Before 



gun team holding up the enemy by revolver fire 
from the inner compartment. Not many months 
before this same division, under the same cora- 
mander. Sir H. Jeudwine, had given way before 
the German counter-attack at Cambrai, when 
weary, weak in numbers, and holding a very ex- 
tended front. It had then been subjected to a 
great deal of ill-founded criticism, but in this battle 
it sent a proud answer to its critics and told them 
that the simple process of judging by results, which 
has so often been commended, is rarely applicable 
in war, and that the popular cry for victims when 
things are not going well is wrong in nine cases out 
of ten. 

At the other end of the break the enemy made 
more progress, and despite the stout resistance of 
the 9th Division on the Messines Ridge, worked his 
way to the north and south of Armentieres, at the 
same time deluging the town with gas shell to an 
extent which made life in it impossible. It was 
therefore abandoned on the tenth, while the next 
day Merville fell. The Germans now began a 
dangerous movement towards Hazebrouck, the 
central railway junction of Flanders, and on the 
twelfth it was as near capture as Amiens had been 
during the crisis of the March battle. So serious 
was the position that extensive preparations were 
made for flooding the approaches to Dunkerque 
and Calais and for sending back to England from 
those ports all personnel not immediately needed 

47 



The Last Four Months 



for their working; while, in order to shorten his 
fronts and to get reserves to meet this new German 
rush for Calais, Haig, with a sad heart, ordered a 
withdrawal from the Flanders ridges, which had 
been won at such cost in the previous autumn, to 
a line just covering Ypres. But once again British 
troops, never so brilliant as in a defensive battle 
against great odds, surpassed all expectations. On 
the thirteenth the remnants of the 29th and 31st 
Divisions, strung out on a very wide front, contested 
every foot of ground with bullet and bayonet, and 
beat off a succession of fierce attacks from early 
morning until late afternoon, so gaining time for the 
1st Australian Division, railed up from the Somme, 
to detrain at Hazebrouck, come forward and help to 
save that town. 

The most pressing danger was then averted; 
but the Germans, though foiled in their attempt to 
open a direct way to Calais and Boulogne, still 
fought fiercely to extend their gains. On the 
fifteenth the arrival of reinforcements enabled them 
to capture Bailleul, and the strain upon the British 
army had become all but insupportable. Two thirds 
of the divisions engaged in the Flanders battle 
had been through the fiery trial of the Somme. 
As fast as they were withdrawn from the first battle 
their ranks were refilled with the drafts from home, 
which were composed mainly of boys of nineteen 
and under, and they were sent north. It was these 
splendid youths, many of whom went into the 



What Went Before 



maelstrom of battle within a few days of landing 
in France, with little opportunity of getting to 
know their leaders or of accustoming themselves 
to strange and terrible conditions, who saved the 
Channel ports. But Haig could not go on in- 
definitely reconstituting his shattered divisions and 
sending them back into battle, and he was very 
near the end of his resources. By the middle of 
April, however, French troops had come to our aid, 
and with their help repeated attacks by the Ger- 
mans in the neighbourhood of Kemmel on the 
sixteenth and seventeenth were repulsed, and there- 
after for a time the battle in Flanders died down. 

The interest then shifted to the southern battle- 
field, where on April 24 the Germans made a last 
attempt to break through to Amiens, and for a time 
were in possession of Villers-Bretonneux. This was 
one of the few attacks made by the Germans in which 
they used tanks with success, and it was their tanks 
which cleared a way into the village for the German 
infantry. The situation was highly critical, for 
Rawlinson, who had assumed command on the 
Amiens front on Gough's recall to England, was very 
weak, Haig having called upon him for every man 
he could spare to nourish the battle in Flanders, while 
if the Germans had managed to establish themselves 
a very short distance to the west of Villers-Bretonneux 
they would have been able to look down upon 
Amiens. It was no time for hesitation, and a bril- 
liant counter-attack made on the night of the twenty- 

49 



The Last Four Months 



fourth, before the Germans had time to establish 
themselves in their newly won positions, saved us 
in yet another crisis. In this counter-attack, which 
was made by troops of the 4th and 5th Australian 
Divisions, by a mixed brigade made up from the 
18th and 58th Divisions, and by part of the 8th 
Division, which had been holding the village and its 
neighbourhood, Villers-Bretonneux was recaptured 
and the gate to Amiens was securely locked. 

Two days later the battle broke out again in 
Flanders, and on April 25 the enemy, reinforcing his 
troops on the Kemmel front with five fresh divisions, 
succeeded in breaking in on either side of Kemmel 
Hill, which was at the time held by the French, and 
in cutting off the garrison. This was a very serious 
blow, for in Kemmel Hill the enemy obtained a 
grand observatory, from the top of which he could 
overlook all our lines as far north as Ypres and could 
watch all the roads and railways leading thither from 
as far west as Poperinghe. Therefore a further with- 
drawal of our front in the salient became necessary. 
In the result, however, the gain of Kemmel proved 
to be the enemy's undoing, for it encouraged him 
to make a great attack on April 29, which extended 
from near Bailleul to the north of Ypres. The 
German infantry came on in massed formation with 
bayonets fixed, and were completely repulsed by our 
troops and by the French and Belgians on our flanks. 
On our front, between Kemmel and Ypres, the 
enemy's repeated and heavy assaults were all beaten 

50 



What Went Before 



back by the 21st, 49th and 25th Divisions, which, 
except at one point to the south of Ypres, yielded 
not a yard of ground. This failure was hardly less 
important in its effect on the campaign than that 
which the Germans had suffered on March 28, and, 
as will be seen, these two triumphs of our defense 
over the enemy's attack went far in preparation for 
the victories which came later in the year. On 
April 30 the battle came to a close with the recapture 
of the village of Locre, on the Bailleul- Ypres road, 
to the west of Kemmel, by our French Allies. 

In rather less than six weeks the Germans had 
flung no fewer than one hundred and forty-one 
divisions against the combined British and French 
forces. Fifty-five infantry divisions and three cav- 
alry divisions of Haig's army had stayed the at- 
tacks of one hundred and nine German divisions. 
The third German campaign of conquest in the 
West had been defeated by the grit and endurance 
of the British soldier, and by the timely appoint- 
ment of Foch to the supreme command, but at a 
terrible cost. Our casualties amounted to more 
than 300,000 killed, wounded and missing — that 
is, very nearly double our losses in the eight and a 
half months of the Dardanelles campaign, and over 
70,000 more than our losses in the three and a half 
months of the third battle of Ypres. In that battle 
we had captured 24,600 prisoners and 64 guns, and 
we had gained possession of the Flanders ridges. At 
the end of the battles of March and April we stood 

51 



The Last Four Months 



"with our backs to the wall"; we had lost 70,000 
prisoners, 1,000 guns, 4,000 machine-guns, 700 
trench mortars, 200 tanks, and an immense quantity 
of stores.^ The worst result of the strain which had 
been thrown upon our army was that eight of our 
divisions, in consequence of our heavy losses and 
of our lack of means to replace them promptly, 
had to be reduced to skeletons, and vs^ere for a con- 
siderable period unable to fight even defensively 
in the line, while the Portuguese contingent had 
entirely disappeared as a fighting force. Such was 
the price which we had to pay for our failure to 
prepare adequately for a menace which had long 
been foreseen. Had the Government taken in time 
the measures which it had been urged to take, the 
reduction of two cavalry divisions and of more than 
one hundred infantry battalions might have been 
avoided, and both Gough and Byng might have had 
sufficient men to have enabled them to hold their 
battle positions against all attacks, while Haig's 
reserve might have been increased by at least two 
divisions. Our men had shown coolness, courage, 
determination and endurance in adversity which 
pass all understanding and are beyond all praise, 
but they should never and need never have been 
called upon for such sacrifices as they made with- 
out stint and without complaint. 

^ The figures of losses of material are those given by the Ministry of 
Munitions, and represent the replacements necessary after the battles. 
The actual captures by the Germans were somewhat smaller. 

52 



CHAPTER II 

FOCH VERSUS LUDENDORFF 

Foch on the Defensive — Breaking the Barrier 
in the West — The Rival Methods 

Foch made his name before the war as a military 
thinker. First as a professor and then as chief of 
the French War College, he acquired a European 
reputation, and to have been a student under him was 
regarded as a special distinction by the officers of the 
French staff during the war. While at the War 
College he published two books which were regarded 
by the military world as the most inspiring and 
thoughtful studies of war v/hich had appeared since 
Clausewitz produced his great work. It was these 
books which caused Lord Roberts to predict, some 
ten years before Germany threw down the gaunt- 
let, that when the great European struggle, for which 
he was urging Great Britain to prepare, came, the 
world would hear of Foch, — who was then unknown 
outside professional circles. This reputation of 
Foch's had been built up by writing and by study. 
It was the reputation of a theorist, and since war is 
a very practical business, even the greatest of theo- 
rists is regarded more or less with suspicion until 

53 



The Last Four Months 



he has proved himself in practice. There were 
many in the French army before the war who looked 
upon Foch as a bookman. It was the way in which 
he covered the withdrawal of the French army 
from Lorraine, when Joffre's first offensive failed, 
and above all his brilliant blow delivered on Sep- 
tember 9, 1914, near the marshes of St. Gond, in 
the first battle of the Marne, which showed the 
world that Foch was as good at practice as at theory. 
Great as were these early achievements, I doubt 
if anything shows Foch's mastery of his craft more 
clearly than his handling of the situation in the days 
which followed his appointment to the supreme com- 
mand. The fate of the world hung in the balance, 
and there was no time for hesitation or delay. The 
new Generalissimo had to form a headquarters 
rapidly, and to organise in the midst of a great 
battle the machinery necessary for the command of 
five million men extended over a front of four hun- 
dred and fifty miles, tasks which, in the circum- 
stances, would have taxed the capacity of any ordi- 
nary man. Not only did he do this, but he had 
not been in the saddle many hours before he made 
his personality felt. The success of Ludendorff's at- 
tempt to separate the British from the French army 
and to capture the great railway junction of Amiens 
depended almost entirely upon the progress he made 
before the French reserves from the south reached 
the battlefield. The French staff had worked out 
the movements of troops towards Amiens with 

54 



Foch versus Ludendor£ 



their usual care and precision. A systematic flow 
of divisions to the point of danger had been ar- 
ranged for, but Foch wanted a flood, not a flow. 

It has often been objected that the tendency of 
war schools is towards pedantry, that their students 
are inclined to be too much tied to the methods 
which they have learned during their course of 
study ; and it might have been expected that Foch, 
who represented the essence of the teaching of the 
modern war colleges, would have been predisposed 
in favour of staff routine, but he fairly astounded 
the experts by his methods. It is the sign of the 
master that he makes system his servant, that he 
has the technique of his profession under his con- 
trol, that he knows when to put rules aside and when 
to follow them. In that first week which followed 
the fateful meeting at Doullens of March 26, when 
he was given supreme control, Foch tore up all 
staff time-tables and by any and every means, 
orthodox and unorthodox, rushed troops to the 
point of danger. They were brought up by train, 
by marches, in motor-lorries, in busses ; with or 
without transport, with or without their proper 
complement of supplies and ammunition. The 
point was to get to the battlefield men who could 
fight; details of organisation could be straightened 
out afterwards. So by inspiring those under him 
with his own fierce energy, Foch in the first ten days 
of his tenure of command brought to the battle 
nearly twice as many troops as had been estimated 

55 



The Last Four Months 



for by the French staff, and by so doing built up a 
barrier against which the waves of German troops 
beat in vain. 

I saw Foch at the beginning of April, when he 
had been in control about a week, at his temporary 
headquarters in the town hall of Beauvais, and thus 
early he was satisfied that he had the situation in 
hand. Despite the immense burden and responsi- 
bility on his shoulders, he was perfectly confident 
and cheerful. He leaned back in his chair smok- 
ing his inevitable cigar and looking at the great 
map on the wall opposite on which each day's prog- 
ress of the German offensive was marked in colour; 
he pointed out how that progress was steadily 
diminishing, how the marks on the map grew closer 
together, just as do the circles made by a stone 
thrown into a pond before the last ripple disap- 
pears. "I am still fighting," he said, "and,! have 
first to stabilise the front of battle. Ludendorff 
will probably try again, but he won't get through. 
In a few days more I shall have his progress per- 
manently blocked." The day after I left Beau- 
vais, on April 4, Ludendorff, sure enough, did make 
another great effort, but it ended in disaster for the 
Germans, and the front was stabilised. 

I saw Foch again just a fortnight later, on April 
16, at the height of the second crisis of the spring 
of 1918, when the Germans were on the outskirts 
of Hazebrouck, and appeared to be well on the 
road to Calais and Boulogne. Foch had then 

5Q 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



moved his headquarters to a small chateau be- 
hind Amiens, and the organisation of his staff 
was more or less complete. Despite this second 
shock and the exhaustion of the British army, 
Foch had not lost one bit of his confidence. There 
were many criticisms in England at this time that 
he was leaving our army without support, and 
that the French should take a greater share in 
bearing the burden of meeting the great German 
offensive. But Foch had himself measured ac- 
curately both the German strength and the en- 
durance of the British army, of which he had ample 
experience during the first battle of Ypres, when 
he helped us to stop the first German rush to Calais. 
It is the experience of every commander on the 
defensive in battle to receive urgent appeals for 
reinforcements from his hard-pressed front. His 
quality as a general is tested by his ability to ap- 
preciate these appeals at their proper value, to 
know when and in what strength to send help from 
his precious reserves and when to disregard the ap- 
peal altogether. His chance of winning the battle 
depends upon his having reserves to use at the 
right time and place, and if they are weakened too 
soon all hope of victory is gone. 

On April 16 the situation still looked very doubt- 
ful on our front in Flanders; but Foch thought 
otherwise. "The battle in Flanders is practically 
over," he said; "Haig will not need any more 
troops from me." Not even the loss of Kemmel a 

57 



The Last Four Months 



few days later ruffled him. He was right, and the 
battle in Flanders ended in a complete repulse of 
the second German effort to break through. 

Foch used to impress upon his students the su- 
preme importance in war of the will and spirit of 
the Commander-in-Chief. The commander, he said, 
is the sword of his army. The general who refuses 
to admit the possibility of defeat can compel victory ; 
a general who thinks he may be beaten is halfway 
on the road to defeat. In those dark days of the 
spring of 1918, Foch did not fail to put these prin- 
ciples of his into practice, and it was his courage 
and resolution which laid the foundation of victory. 
He was nobly supported by Sir Douglas Haig, 
whose calm, unruffled temperament enabled him 
to stand the appalling strain which began when 
his right crumbled on March 21 and continued until 
June, when the arrival of British reinforcements 
from the East and the steady growth of the Ameri- 
can army allowed him to breathe more freely. But 
for Foch an even more severe trial was coming. He 
believed that the most dangerous course which 
Ludendorff could take, and therefore the most prob- 
able one, was to continue the attempt to separate 
the British from the French army, and he accord- 
ingly took measures to meet such an attack by the 
Germans. 

There was at this time much talk of Foch's 
"army of manoeuvre", but it never existed, save 
in the imagination of those critics who had got hold 

58 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



of the term from a superficial study of Napoleon's 
strategy. Foch had all he could do to stop the holes 
which Ludendorff was making in the Allied front by 
sending divisions to reinforce the armies which were 
being pressed back. In order to have fresh divi- 
sions ready for this purpose he had to place in the 
line other divisions which had been sorely battered 
in battle and filled up with recruits whose training 
had been cut short. As soon as the battle in Flan- 
ders was ended Foch arranged with Haig to send 
down to the Chemin-des-Dames, on the Aisne 
front, five British divisions, of which four had fought 
the Germans both in the March battle on the Somme 
and in the April battle in Flanders, and the fifth 
had been heavily engaged in the former battle. 
The Chemin-des-Dames K-idge was looked upon 
as a position of great strength, and Foch did not 
think it likely that the Germans would attack it. 
He therefore withdrew from it a number of fresh 
French divisions, which he placed in reserve ready 
to meet the attack which he expected Ludendorff 
to renew upon Amiens, and replaced them with 
tired French and British divisions. 

While the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht 
had been endeavouring to force his way to the Chan- 
nel ports, the German Crown Prince had been rest- 
ing his troops which had taken part in the Somme 
battle, and he had a great number of divisions in 
reserve down the valley of the Oise. These divi- 
sions were so placed that, while they threatened 

59 



The Last Four Months 



an attack upon Amiens, they could be moved just 
as quickly against the Chemin-des-Dames. Luden- 
dorff was, in fact, playing again the game he had 
played in March, and on May 27 he surprised 
the French and British troops on the Chemin-des- 
Dames by much the same niethods as he had used 
against the British Third and Fifth Armies. Again 
the boys, of whom the British divisions were in 
great part composed, covered themselves with glory 
on the right of the battle front and saved Reims by 
their tenacity in ten days of battle, which took the 
place of the rest they had been promised; but the 
Allied centre divisions were overwhelmed, and the 
German Crown Prince drove straight through to 
the Marne, where his further progress was checked 
just in time by the arrival at Chateau-Thierry of 
American troops. This German drive brought the 
enemy within forty miles of Paris, and was a heavy 
blow both to Foch and to the French people. Sim- 
ultaneously with the Crown Prince's attack, "Big 
Bertha" began bombarding Paris, and a number 
of air raids were made upon the French capital, 
from which an exodus began very similar to that 
which had taken place in 1914 before the first battle 
of the Marne. 

Foch was now in the most trying position in 
which a Commander-in-Chief can be placed in war. 
The enemy had deceived him and the capital of 
his country was in danger. Soldiers know that 
the general who makes no mistakes in war achieves 

60 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



nothing, and they understand how difficult it is 
for a commander who has been forced to stand 
on the defensive to divine what the enemy may 
do next; but the statesmen and general public of 
democratic countries very rarely appreciate the 
difficulties and limitations of defense, and the 
general who has failed to foresee and provide for 
an emergency is usually looked at askance by them. 
In any circumstances the position of a Commander- 
in-Chief whose troops have been worsted in battle 
is not enviable, but his troubles and responsibilities 
are increased tenfold when he is answerable to 
certain ministers and is in command not only of 
troops of his own nation, but of the armies of Allies. 
One of the greatest tributes to Foch's strength 
of will and character is that in this time of trial 
he kept the confidence of the Allied armies and of 
the Allied Governments, and both M. Clemenceau 
and Mr. Lloyd George deserve their full share of 
credit for the trust which they reposed in him de- 
spite this inauspicious overture to "unity of com- 
mand." The days were now fast approaching 
when this trust was to have its reward. 

Ludendorff's March offensive had led to an ap- 
peal from the British Government to the United 
States of America to expedite the despatch of troops 
to France. This appeal met with a prompt and 
warm response, and resulted in one of the most 
remarkable achievements of the whole war. From 
the month of June onwards 300,000 American 

61 



The Last Four Months 



soldiers were brought each month across the At- 
lantic, a feat of transportation which is without 
parallel in the history of war. This feat, which 
upset all Ludendorff's calculations as to the rate at 
which American troops could reach France, was made 
possible by the spirit and enthusiasm of the Ameri- 
can people, by the supremacy of the British Navy, 
and by the self-denial of the British people, who, 
in order to save tonnage to bring American troops 
to France, willingly accepted restrictions upon im- 
ports into Great Britain which imposed upon them 
very real privations. 

By the beginning of June these measures had 
begun to take effect, and the number of American 
divisions in France mounted very rapidly. At the 
same time a steady stream of seasoned British troops, 
withdrawn from other theatres of war, was pouring 
into France, and, owing to the respite which Luden- 
dorff allowed the British army while he was forcing 
his way toward the Marne, there was time for Sir 
Douglas Haig to assimilate and train the drafts sent 
out from England. This work of reconstructing the 
British army was much helped by the arrival on 
the British front of several American divisions, 
of which some went into the line and thus enabled 
British divisions to be withdrawn for rest and 
training. 

So it came about by the middle of June that 
though the Germans were within forty miles of 
Paris and within forty miles of Calais and but 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



little farther from Boulogne, and Ludendorff had 
still strong reserves at his disposal, yet the danger 
of a crushing German victory was daily growing 
smaller. This was shown by the result of Luden- 
dorff's fcfurth offensive, which took place in the 
second week of June, and was intended to improve 
the position created by the German Crown Prince's 
surprise at the Chemin-des-Dames. The drive 
to the Marne had left the Germans in possession 
of a triangular salient some twenty-six miles deep 
and about thirty-three miles wide at the base along 
the Aisne, the apex of the triangle being at Chateau- 
Thierry. The triangle was somewhat confined for 
the assembly of large forces within it, and Luden- 
dorff wanted more elbow room. Therefore one 
of the Crown Prince's generals. Von Hutier, at- 
tempted to widen the base of the triangle to the 
west of Soissons by an attack delivered between 
the Amiens and the Marne salients. The imme- 
diate objective of this attack was Compiegne, and 
had von Hutier succeeded in taking that town he 
would have linked up the two salients and have 
given Ludendorff a much more convenient front 
for an attack upon Paris. Foch, however, was 
ready, and foiled von Hutier by a counter-attack 
which was an earnest of what was to come later. 
The Germans did not reach Compiegne, their posi- 
tion for an attack upon Paris was not appreciably 
improved, and they got little return for very heavy 
losses. 

03 



The Last Four Months 



After von Hutier's attack was brought to a stop 
Ludendorff set about preparing for his great effort. 
As to the result of this effort the Germans were 
more blatantly confident and boastful than they 
had been any time since their first victories of 
August, 1914. They said that the British army 
had been exhausted by its defeats in the spring, 
and that we had no men with which to make good 
our losses. They said that it was utterly impos- 
sible that America should have in the time created 
armies fit to fight in battle, that the Allies were 
bluflSng when they spoke about the large number 
of American troops in France. They said that 
the Allies had not at their disposal the shipping 
to make such movement of troops possible. The 
U-boats had seen to that.^ Ludendorff informed 
his Government on the eve of the battle that vic- 
tory was certain, a fact not mentioned by Luden- 
dorff in his Reminiscences but disclosed by von 
Hintze, who was then Secretary for Foreign Affairs. 
As to the quality of the American troops, the Ger- 
man authorities issued this remarkable statement : 

"Demonstrations against the war are the order 
of the day in New York. Of the enthusiasm an- 

^ "Prussia collapsed — there then arose the possibility which before 
the autumn of 1917 no one had contemplated, of seeking to bring about 
a decision of the war during 1918 by an attack on land which would be 
certain to succeed if by that time the U-boat campaign had reduced 
tonnage to an extent which made the rapid transport of American 
troops impossible, or if our submarines were able to hit some of the 
enemy's transports. According to the reports made by the Navy, this 
was to be expected." Ludendorff, p. 332. 

64 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



nounced in the Entente reports there is no trace 
amongst the Americans who have been called up 
for military service. Soldiers on embarkation al- 
most make a despairing impression, and are kept 
together by a police force which has been specially 
created for the purpose." 

This is but one of a large number of official and 
semi-official pronouncements distributed to the 
German press and amongst the German troops 
during the summer of 1918, and this policy of decep- 
tion was, I believe, one of the contributory causes 
of the suddenness of the collapse when things began 
to go wrong. Soldiers and people then discovered 
that those in authority over them had either been 
lying to them or had been hopelessly wrong in their 
judgment, and they lost faith just at the time when 
faith was most needed. It is not at present easy to 
determine how far these misrepresentations were 
deliberate on the part of the German authorities 
and how far the responsibility lay with agents who 
sought for and sent in information which would be 
pleasing rather than the truth. The German spy 
system has always been held up as a model of effi- 
ciency, and the popular belief was that the Germans 
knew everything which went on inside our lines 
or took place at our most secret councils. It is cer- 
tainly true that the German spy system was very 
elaborate, and that it gave their authorities good 
information upon points of detail, but the test of 
any system of intelligence is the correctness or 

65 



The Last Four Months 



otherwise of the impression which it creates in the 
minds of the generals and statesmen who use it, 
and at every great crisis in this war the German 
intelligence system created a wrong impression. 

In July, 1914, the Germans believed that Bel- 
gium would be terrorised into submission and that 
Great Britain, being fully occupied with Irish and 
labour troubles, would not fight. A month later, 
before the first battle of the Marne, they held that 
the British army had been annihilated and that 
the morale of the French troops was broken. The 
Kaiser had arranged the details of his entry into 
Paris, and had ordered a gala luncheon at the Hotel 
Majestic, near the Arc de Triomphe. In the spring 
of 1917 they believed that Great Britain was on 
the verge of starvation, and that six months of 
unrestricted U-boat warfare would bring us to our 
knees.^ They were so completely out in their 
understanding of the psychology of the American 
people that they did not understand that an order 
to the United States not to send across the At- 
lantic more than one vessel a week, which was to 
be painted in a particular way and to follow a par- 
ticular route to a particular British port, would in- 
fallibly arouse and unite all classes in an irresistible 
enthusiasm for the war. In September, 1917, Luden- 
dorff, in a review of the position which he sub- 

1 Ludendor£f thought this would take a year, but believed it would be 
accomplished before America could intervene effectively. Ludendorfl, 
p. 249. 

66 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



mitted to his Government, implied that Great 
Britain, France, and Italy were on the verge of ex- 
haustion and that their internal condition was more 
precarious than that of Germany, whose military 
position was far the stronger. No account was taken 
in this document of the effect of America's economic 
and financial aid to the Entente. In July, 1918, 
before the second battle of the Marne, the Germans 
were equally out in their count, and they christened 
beforehand the battle which they were to fight the 
"Friedensturm", the attack which would bring 
peace — of course a German peace. The Kaiser 
had a grand stand built for himself on a wooded 
height overlooking the Marne, and to this he 
mounted on the morning of July 15 to see his troops 
advance to victory. 

While the Germans were busy with their prepara- 
tions for winning the war by one great final blow 
Foch was also at work. He had divined Luden- 
dorff's plan, and he was quite certain that the Ger- 
mans meant to attack upon both sides of Reims, 
— that is to say, that the German Crown Prince 
would renew his attempts to get to Paris. It hap- 
pened, however, that the other Crown Prince, the 
Bavarian Rupprecht, had strong reserves in 
Flanders, and a short advance there would, as I 
have already pointed out, place the German guns 
within range of the Channel ports. Foch had been 
wrong in May, and he might be wrong again this 
time. He was himself confident that he was right, 

67 



The Last Four Months 



but he had to convince the AUied statesmen that he 
was right, for he did not feel himself strong enough 
to deal with the German Crown Prince without 
drawing upon Haig for troops, and thus weakening 
the armies covering the Channel coast. It does 
honour to Foch, to Mr. Lloyd George, and to Sir 
Douglas Haig that in this critical time they all 
agreed. Both the British Government and the 
British Commander-in-Chief supported Foch, de- 
cided to back his judgment, and to take the great 
risk of weakening the British forces in the north, 
and he was thus enabled to mature his plans for 
the defeat of Ludendorfif. 

Foch's plans were based on a prolonged study of 
the conditions of trench warfare. The war on the 
Western Front has been repeatedly compared to a 
great siege. That comparison is accurate only 
up to a certain point. The conditions of trench 
warfare were, after due allowance is made for the 
changes due to modern improvements in arms, 
very like those which prevailed in some of the 
great sieges of the past. There was the same 
deadly monotony of life in the trenches ; there 
was a return to the weapons used in the past in the 
attack and defense of fortresses, — hand grenades, 
mortars and heavy artillery; there were the same 
hardships to be endured, due to the stationary 
life in holes dug in the ground, wet, cold, and mud 
in winter, heat, dust, and flies in summer; there 
were sallies by defenders and raids by the attackers, 

68 



Foch versus LudendorJ^ 



there were struggles for the outworks, and when the 
defenders tried to break out or the attackers to 
break in they both began by blasting a great breach 
in the defenses with a concentrated bombardment of 
heavy artillery and 'followed this with an assault 
by the infantry. There, however, the analogy ends. 
In the old days, once the assailants had broken 
through the defenses into the town which they pro- 
tected, their work was, with some rare exceptions, 
finished, and the place was at their mercy, but 
in the great war the worst of the struggle then 
began. The defender, who was not cooped up in a 
town, but had ample space behind his lines and 
plenty of roads and railways at his disposal, was 
able to keep his reserves far back, where they could 
rest undisturbed by the enemy's artillery, and to 
bring them up fresh to the battlefield at a time 
when the attacking infantry was becoming wearied, 
when it had been thrown more or less into con- 
fusion by the stress of battle, when the difficulty 
of sending forward reinforcements and supplies 
of food and ammunition was for the assailant at 
its greatest. The essential difference between the 
siege warfare of old and the warfare as we have 
seen it during the great struggle in France and 
Belgium is that in the former a successful assault 
normally finished the business and brought victory ; 
in the latter, the assault was but a prelude to a 
battle with the enemy's reserves. 

From November, 1914, when trench lines were 

69 



The Last Four Months 



first established between the North Sea and the 
Swiss frontier, all the generals on the Western 
Front — British, French, and German — were at 
work trying to solve the problem of how to break 
through. At first it was believed that this was 
mainly a question of having sufficient guns and 
sufficient ammunition of the right kind, of blasting 
a big enough hole in the defenses. In 1915 Foch, 
with British help on his left flank, tried twice to 
capture the Vimy Ridge, and both times he failed 
with very heavy losses. In the same year Joffre 
tried, by a great assault delivered in Champagne, 
to burst through the German lines, and he, too, 
failed. In the first half of 1916 the Germans, 
using much the same method of an artillery bom- 
bardment, followed by an infantry assault, tried to 
reach Verdun and were defeated. In the summer 
and autumn of that year Haig fought the first 
battle of the Somme, which relieved Verdun and 
forced the Germans to retreat into the Hinden- 
burg line, but ended there, like the other battles, 
in the deadlock of trench warfare. In 1917 
General Nivelle succeeded General Joffre in the 
supreme command of the French armies, and though 
Haig, in the battle of Arras, carried out the part 
assigned to him by Nivelle, and the British army 
bit deep into the German lines, capturing the Vimy 
Ridge, the great attack in the Aisne front ended in 
a failure which shook the confidence of the French 
army. 

70 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



Up to this time it had been argued that the 
success won had been sufficient to warrant the 
hope that with more and heavier guns, improved 
methods of gunnery and larger supplies of shell, 
the breach would be wider and deeper and that the 
assault must succeed. So the military policy in 
the Western theatre of war during 1915 and 1916 
continued to be to increase the power and duration 
of the bombardment, and when a battle did not give 
the results expected it was always possible, as the 
munition factories of the Allies grew in size and num- 
bers, to look forward to a still greater bombardment 
next time. But in 1917 the Allies suffered from no 
lack of equipment, and it was quite evident that 
want of success was no longer due to want of shell. 
The colossal bombardments which heralded these 
attacks literally tore off the surface of the ground. 
The guns had done their part, the breach was made, 
but the story was always the same. The first 
bound forward of the attackers was almost in- 
variably successful, and they easily overcame such 
of the enemy as remained alive in the bombarded 
area with comparatively little loss to themselves. 
Then up came the enemy's reserves, and a slow 
hammer-and-tongs struggle developed, in which 
the attackers slowly gained ground at a very high 
price until gradually the attack lost its momentum 
and died away from exhaustion. Clearly the great 
bombardment was not the key to the problem, 
and it was necessary to look for some other solution. 

TI 



The Last Four Months 



During the autumn of 1916 and the summer of 
1917 the French and British had fought a number of 
what in these days would be called small battles 
with complete success, the French around Verdun 
and on the Aisne front, the British on the Messines 
Ridge in Flanders. In these battles there was 
no attempt made to push the infantry far beyond 
the limits of the area which had been thoroughly 
pounded in the first bombardment, and in each of 
these ground was gained and a considerable number 
of prisoners and guns captured very cheaply. This 
confirmed the experience gained in the opening 
phases of most of the great battles, namely, that 
it was comparatively easy for the guns to win the 
ground within their range and for the infantry 
then to advance and occupy it. The Allies did 
not possess a sufiicient number of guns to allow them 
to deliver a rapid succession of these punches against 
the different parts of the front, and it took a long 
time to shift a mass of artillery from one part of 
the line to another, but it was believed that a series 
of such blows delivered on the same front would 
end in the exhaustion of the German reserves and in 
a break through. This was called the attack with 
limited objective. The guns were to bombard an area 
of ground and the infantry to go forward and over- 
come the Germans, dazed and stunned by the bom- 
bardment ; then the guns were to be moved forward on 
to the ground won, and the process was to be repeated 
until the infantry were able to break clean through. ' 

72 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



On this principle the third battle of Ypres was 
fought by the British army in the late summer and 
autumn of 1917. That battle began on July 31, 
but, unfortunately, the month of August proved to 
be phenomenally wet and Ludendorff had devised 
a very successful answer to this form of attack. 
The mud of Flanders proved a terrible obstacle. 
It made the bringing forward of the guns and the 
masses of ammunition needed to feed them a work 
almost beyond human power, and the infantry had 
to endure indescribable hardship, with no cover 
from the enemy's fire save such as could be found 
in water-logged shell-holes and trenches pounded by 
our artillery into a sticky mess. At every step 
forward they sank to their knees or. over into the 
gluey slime, which the soil of Flanders becomes 
when torn by shells and saturated with rain. Added 
to all this, the Germans neutralised the effect of 
the bombardment, upon which the plan of attack 
depended so largely for its success, by withdrawing 
all but a few men from the ground which would 
be most heavily shelled by us, and by meeting our 
weary infantry as they dragged themselves forward 
through the mud with counter-attacks by fresh 
troops. So the fight up the ridges from Ypres to 
Passchendaele was a long, slow, costly business, 
and it came to an end before the problem of beating 
the enemy's reserves had been solved. 

Then a new experiment was tried. Tanks had 
been first used by the British army in the battle 

73 



The Last Four Months 



of the Somme in small numbers. There are a great 
many people who believed, and still believe, that 
this was a great mistake ; they hold that we should 
have waited until we had tanks in large numbers 
and then sprung a great surprise on the Germans. 
But it is an impossibility to simulate in practice the 
conditions of war, or to be certain how any new 
device will turn out until it has been tried in the 
field against the enemy. Further, the efficacy 
of any device to be used in war does not depend 
only, or even chiefly, upon its own perfections or 
imperfections ; it depends mainly upon how it fits 
into the military machine. All the parts of an army, 
artillery, infantry, cavalry, tanks, machine-guns and 
air-craft have to learn to work together, to know 
what each can do and what are the needs of each, and 
this can only be learned by long practice together. 
The first experience of the tanks, in the autumn of 
1916 and the spring of 1917, was disappointing. 
They were found to be too slow to keep pace even 
with the infantry, they broke down frequently, and 
there were many kinds of ground which they could 
not get over. In the battle of Messines the infantry 
found that the artillery had done all and more than 
all that was needed, and for the most part they 
did not wait for the tanks. In the third battle of 
Ypres the mud proved altogether too much 
for the new weapon. So for a time many of our 
generals and most of the infantry distrusted the 
tanks and regarded them as a failure. This did 

74 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



not damp the enthusiasm of the experts, who worked 
incessantly at improving the tanks, at devising new 
methods of employing them, and at showing the 
infantry how to work with them, and in November, 
1917, the tanks got their first real chance. Haig 
decided to make a surprise attack on the very strong- 
est part of the German front, the Hindenburg line 
west of Cambrai. 

Hitherto, the time and labour required to collect 
a great mass of guns and the huge stores of shell for 
them had made it almost impossible to surprise the 
enemy, for this involved the extension of railway 
lines, the laying of tramways, the construction 
of roads and a great increase in the normal traffic 
behind the lines. The German aeroplanes and 
spies always found out that something was up. 
Haig proposed to bring up a large number of tanks 
secretly at the last possible moment and to use 
them instead of guns to make the breach for his 
infantry. The Germans had sent most of their 
reserves up to Flanders to meet our attacks at 
Passchendaele, and, relying on the strength of the 
Hindenburg line, had weakened the Cambrai front. 
The surprise was completely successful, and the 
tanks more than justified themselves by breaking 
clean through the most formidable defenses which 
the Germans had been able to devise and by pre- 
paring the way for the advance of the infantry. 
Unfortunately, as I have already mentioned, the 
disaster to the Italian army occurred at Caporetto, 

75 



The Last Four Months 



and Haig had to send five divisions southward to 
the help of our Allies despite his urgent request to 
be allowed to keep at least two to support his at- 
tack at Cambrai. None of our five divisions fired a 
shot before the enemy were checked on the Piave, 
and we were furnished with a classical example of 
the advantages to a skilful enemy of interior lines of 
communication. This reduction of his strength so 
weakened Haig that he was unable to follow up 
his success, and when the German reserves arrived 
they won back a good part of the ground we had 
gained. 

This, then, was the position at the beginning of 
1918, when Ludendorff was bringing his troops 
across from Russia and preparing for his great of- 
fensive. The attempt to break through by means 
of a great bombardment • followed by an infantry 
assault had failed; so had the attempt to break 
through by means of a series of bombardments 
and assaults upon one part of the front. The 
attack with limited objective, the short, sharp 
punch in which the infantry moved forward and 
occupied the ground won in a single bombardment 
had proved a success, but the results gained by 
this method of attack had made little impression 
upon the whole long front. The use of tanks in 
numbers in replacement of the prolonged bom- 
bardment held out promise for the future. Luden- 
dorff was deeply impressed by our surprise attack at 
Cambrai and believed he could break through if 

76 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



he brought off a surprise. He had very few tanks 
and no prospects of getting a large number, for the 
German munition factories could not at this period 
of the war find the necessary material; they had, 
in fact, more than they could do to keep the 
armies supplied with motor transport. 

In 1918 the Germans had barely a score of tanks 
of their own manufacture, and these were of a type 
little, if at all, superior to our tanks of 1916. They 
had added to these by repairing some of the tanks 
which they had captured from us, but at no time 
did they possess any large number. It does not 
appear that Ludendorff was particularly impressed 
with the value of tanks before the events of the 
summer of 1918 taught him wisdom in this respect. 
He had, during the autumn of 1917, prepared an 
able memorandum of our methods in attack, in 
which he adverted to the dependence of our infantry 
upon what he termed material, its failures to seize 
opportunities when they presented themselves, and 
the delay caused by continually relieving infantry 
in the front line. Much that he said was very 
true, particularly as regards our reliance upon 
bombardment as a means of gaining ground, but 
when he included tanks in his condemnation of 
"material" he forgot that he was writing of a new 
weapon capable of improvement. The develop- 
ment of aircraft during the course of the war should 
have taught him caution. It was not the tanks 
of Cambrai which made him think, but the effect 

77 



The Last Four Months 



produced by surprise. We lost a great number 
of tanks in that battle, because we had not yet 
learned how to use them, and did not appreciate 
their dependence upon the support of artillery, 
and Ludendorff, thinking of the success of the 
German counter-attack at Cambrai and of the 
derelict tanks lying within his lines, classed that 
battle as a "battle of material." So he did not 
press his War Office to find means to provide him 
with tanks, and he set about getting his surprise 
by other methods. I have already described those 
methods and the measure of success which they 
achieved. He certainly, in his attacks in the first 
half of 1918, gained more ground, took more pris- 
oners and guns and inflicted heavier losses than 
any other general had succeeded in doing on the 
Western Front. He was very nearly successful 
in his first drive for Amiens in March. He failed, 
as all other generals had failed, because his progress 
was stopped by the defender's reserves. Just at 
the time when the German troops were wearied, 
when it was becoming impossible to sustain the 
momentum of the attack by sending forward fresh 
troops and supplies from the rear, Foch brought 
the French troops from the south upon the scene. 

Then Ludendorff made the mistake of trying* 
for just a little more. His first effort had worn 
itself out by March 29, with the failure of the great 
attack upon the Arras front, but six days later, on 
April 4, after an interval not long enough for the 

73 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



systematic preparation of a fresh battle, but long 
enough for the Allies to strengthen their forces and 
improve their defenses, he made another attempt 
to break through which was shattered and only 
served to deplete his strength. He repeated this 
mistake in Flanders at the end of April, when he 
thought he had foimd another soft spot. At this 
time it was a question whether he would be able to 
keep forces enough in hand for a last smashing blow 
before the arrival of American troops finally turned 
the scale in favour of the Allies, and he fell into 
the same error as every other German general on the 
Western Front, the error of underrating his enemy 
and believing that the next blow must be the smash- 
ing blow. When his first attack in Flanders had 
been checked he tried again on April 29 and suffered a 
severe defeat. The effect of his failures of March 28, 
April 5, and April 29 was that he required time to 
make good his losses, rest his troops, train them and 
replenish his stores of munitions. When the Crown 
Prince's attacks in May and June were stopped by 
the action of the American troops at Chateau- 
Thierry and by Foch's counter-attacks, Luden- 
dorff needed a full month to prepare for his last 
effort, and during that month the Allied reserves, 
far from being used up, were growing daily stronger. 
The German had failed to solve the problem. The 
reserves stood between him and victory. 

A short time before the Germans started their 
last offensive battle of the war a meeting of the 

79 



The Last Four Months 



Supreme War Council took place at Versailles. The 
Allied statesmen were naturally very anxious about 
the situation. The Germans were still within forty 
miles of Paris, they still threatened the Channel 
ports, and they had sprung three great surprises 
upon us in two months. The British generals 
had not thought it possible that the Germans would 
get almost to the outskirts of Amiens, would cap- 
ture Kemmel Hill and menace Hazebrouck; Foch 
had not foreseen that the German Crown Prince 
would reach the Marne. It was true that the bal- 
ance of strength had been steadily shifting in our 
favour. The British army had made a marvellous 
recovery from its reverses in the spring, and with 
the arrival of seasoned troops from Palestine, who 
had not suffered the heavy losses endured by all 
our troops on the Western Front and, therefore, 
had a far higher proportion of men in the prime of 
life, and of experienced officers and non-commis- 
sioned officers, was in as good shape as ever. Haig's 
strength, which had fallen to forty-nine effective 
divisions in May, had risen in July to fifty-three 
divisions, and, thanks to the development of our 
munition factories, not only had our heavy losses 
in guns and war material been promptly replaced, 
but we were stronger in artillery, machine-guns, 
tanks and aeroplanes thaij we had been in March. 
When Pershing heard at the end of March that 
the conference of Doullens had appointed Foch to 
the supreme command he had four combatant divi- 

80 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



sions to offer the new Generalissimo, but of these 
only one, the 1st American Division, was considered 
sufficiently trained to take its place in the line. 
Early in July there were twenty-five American 
divisions in France, and twelve of them had com- 
pleted their training and were ready to take part 
in battle ; such had been the effect of the speeding 
up of the transport of American troops across the 
Atlantic. 

While the forces under Foch's control had been 
growing, Ludendorff's had begun to dwindle. The 
Germans had reached their greatest strength early 
in May, when they had two hundred and seven 
divisions on the Western Front, but they had not 
found it possible to replace at once all the losses 
incurred in the battles of May and June. Alto- 
gether the position was much more favourable than 
it had been six weeks before, yet the fighting strength 
of the Germans was still greater than that of the 
Allies. On the eve of the second battle of the 
Marne they had a superiority of over a quarter of a 
million rifles ; in guns they were about equal to 
the Allied artillery; it was only in machine-guns, 
tanks and aircraft that they were inferior. With 
the flow of American troops to France assured, Foch 
was certain of having an ample reserve in due time, 
and Ludendorff had no means of increasing his, but 
at the moment the number of American troops 
trained to take part in battle was not sufficient to 
give the Allies a definite numerical superiority at 

81 



The Last Four Months 



the front. So the statesmen were still anxious, 
feeling that they could not afford a fourth surprise 
by the Germans. 

Foch was always and rightly reticent as to his 
plans. He would not do more than express his con- 
fidence in general terms. The essential difference 
between his mind and the minds of the German 
generals was that he regarded war as an art, not as 
a science. "There is nothing absolute in war" is 
one of his favourite axioms. He believed it to be 
beyond the power of the human mind to foresee all 
the factors that would influence the actions of the 
opposing general, all the changes and chances on the 
front which would influence the actions of opposing 
troops and often decide the issue of battles. There- 
fore he acted on certain broad principles which, he 
was persuaded, governed the application of his art 
just as there are principles which govern the arts of 
painting, music and architecture ; but he could no 
more tell beforehand what form each of his strokes 
would take than a painter can tell you beforehand 
with what stroke of his brush he will get his effects. 
The artist's strokes depend upon the inspiration 
and the circumstances of the moment, but they are 
not haphazard strokes. They are all made in ac- 
cordance with the principles of art and on a general 
plan. The Germans, on the other hand, believed 
more in the plan than in the inspiration. They were 
very good planners. Von Moltke's first plan for the 
invasion of France was excellent, so in its details was 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



Ludendorff's plan for his offensive in March, 1918. 
Both failed in the execution of their plans because they 
allowed scientific planning to take precedence of 
the principles of the art. So Foch did not tell the 
Allied statesmen assembled at Versailles, in these 
trying days when the Germans were engaged in 
tuning up their war machines for their last great 
blow, very much about his plans. One of them 
asked him point-blank: "But, General, if the Ger- 
mans do make their great attack, what is your 
plan?" and Foch answered by striking out three 
rapid blows, with his right, with his left and again 
with his right, following these by launching out a 
vigorous kick. There was the principle of the art 
dramatically described. 

Foch had been thinking deeply over the problems 
of the war which I have described in the first part 
of this chapter, — how to break through, how to 
defeat the enemy's reserves, how to apply the old 
principles of war to the new conditions of trench war- 
fare, which made a war of movement and manoeuvre 
as it had been conceived in the past impossible. He 
had had his bitter experiences, like other generals. 
His attacks on the Vimy Ridge had failed, and he 
had acquired a reputation in certain quarters of 
being reckless, regardless of the lives of his men. 
Statesmen, anxiously watching the appalling cas- 
ualty lists and the dwindling man-power of the 
nation, were suspicious of a general with such a 
reputation. It is not generally known that for a 

83 



The Last Four Months 



time Foch was under a cloud. After a nasty motor 
accident which befell him in the summer of 1916, 
he was given the duty of studying the possibility 
of a German invasion through Switzerland, a job 
which, for a time, practically put him on the shelf, 
and after he had finished that he was literally placed 
on the shelf for a few weeks, early in 1917, when he 
was actually put on half pay. From this he was 
recalled, largely, I believe, through the influence 
of M. Clemenceau, who had not then become Prime 
Minister of France, to be Chief of Staff in Paris. 
While in Paris he had time for thinking. The 
main facts before him were the failure of the great 
assault upon one part of the front, the terrible 
cost in life of the slow hammer and tongs struggle in 
which it always ended, and the success of the limited 
punches. Therefore, as a principle, he determined 
not to be drawn into a protracted struggle, not to 
attempt the great break through until the enemy's 
reserves were exhausted, and he proposed to ex- 
haust these reserves by a series of limited punches. 
Hence the three short, sharp blows, followed by 
the big kick. Not that he had in July, 1918, worked 
out in detail the great plan by which the war was 
won. He could not have told the statesmen in 
Versailles whether he would be ready for the big 
kick in the autumn of 1918 or whether he would 
have to wait for it until the following year. He 
has said himself that all that he had in his mind 
when he delivered his first punch on July 18 in the 

84 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



second battle of the Marne was to relieve Paris 
and that the purpose of the second punch, made 
by Haig on August 8, was to relieve Amiens. It 
was only when the succession of victories won by 
the British army between August 8 and September 9 
began to produce the effect at which Foch was 
aiming, the exhaustion of the German reserves, 
an effect made certain by Pershing's victory of 
September 12 at St. Mihiel, that he decided on the 
great battle which began on September 26 and 
decided the result of the war. 

All other generals on the Western Front had tried 
the big kick too soon ; most of them had begun with 
it and had not thought it necessary or possible to 
prepare for the maximum effort of which they were 
capable by preliminary fighting. In distant Meso- 
potamia Maude, at the end of 1916, had, by a care- 
fully planned series of limited attacks, worn down 
the resistance of the Turks and had then forced 
his way across the Tigris and routed their army; 
but those operations were, as compared with the 
vast front in France, on a small scale, and the enemy 
was very inferior in skill and equipment to the 
Germans, so the application of Maude's methods 
to the problems of the Western Front did not leap 
to the eye. In 1917 Haig was, as I have said, near 
reaching the solution at Cambrai, but the Caporetto 
disaster supervened, and Cambrai became a sec- 
ondary enterprise instead of the climax of a great 
campaign. In the spring of 1918 Ludendorff had, 

85 



The Last Four Months 



as I have pointed out, made a great advance in 
battle tactics, but he committed the mistake of aim- 
ing from the first at a break through ; he allowed 
himself in each battle to be drawn too far by the 
success of his first battles, so that he was too late 
and too weak when he was ready for the Frieden- 
sturm. 

Foch had always taught before the war that the 
decisive act of the battle in the war of mancEUvre 
must be prepared systematically by a number of 
preliminary combats, and that the opening for the 
knockout blow had to be created. That was a 
military doctrine which was universally accepted. 
He discovered how to apply to the new conditions 
of trench warfare these old principles of war and 
therein lies his title to greatness. Fortune favours 
the brave and the thoughtful, and Foch was fortu- 
nate in that the fierce struggles which had pre- 
ceded the turn in the tide of war had been very far 
from fruitless. The great offensive campaigns of 
the Allies and their resolute courage in defense had 
sapped the military strength of Germany, and in 
July, 1918, the cream of her army had perished. 
Foch had to put the finishing touches to a process 
which had been long at work. The advent of the 
American armies gave him the men, the vast output 
of the Allied munition factories the material, in 
particular the great improvements which had been 
made in the tanks since their first appearance in 
battle and the quantities of them available gave 

86 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



him just the means he needed for carrying through 
his scheme. Cambrai had proved that tanks could 
replace the long bombardment and obviate all the 
slow preparation which it involved. 

Even Cambrai had not, however, established that 
confidence between the infantry and the tanks which 
was essential to success, nor had the cooperation 
between tanks and artillery been completely worked 
out. Cambrai had shown that tanks are particu- 
larly vulnerable to artillery fire, and the Germans 
were known to have placed a number of guns in 
forward positions along their front for the special 
purpose of dealing with our tanks. At Cambrai 
one resolute German artillery officer, working his 
gun to the last from behind a park wall, had knocked 
out a number of our tanks as they came in view, 
much as a sportsman bowls over rabbits bolting 
from ferrets in a warren. Early in July a com- 
paratively small operation carried out by Rawlin- 
son's Fourth Army settled all these problems. Haig 
was even then planning a battle to free Amiens, 
but the clearing of the Villers-Bretonneux plateau 
and the capture of Hamel was a necessary prelimi- 
nary to the larger venture. Rawlinson entrusted 
this task to the Australian Corps, who were given 
sixty of the newest type of tanks to help them. 
The choice was happy, for the Australians had had 
an unfortunate experience with tanks at Bulle- 
court in 1917 and were distrustful of them. The 
work of infantry and tanks in combination was 

ST 



The Last Four Months 



carefully practised beforehand, and on July 4, 
when the attack took place, it was carried through 
"according to plan." The tanks, working behind 
a powerful artillery barrage which protected them 
from the enemy's guns, overcame the German 
machine-guns and drove their infantry into their 
dug-outs, where they fell an easy prey to our in- 
fantry. Thereafter, the Australians could not speak 
too highly of the tanks, and mutual confidence 
was established. 

This little engagement, which ended in the cap- 
ture of all our objectives and of one thousand five 
hundred prisoners, was also noteworthy for the fact 
that four companies of the 33rd American Division 
took part in it. These men had been training in the 
line with the Australians and had eagerly prepared to 
join in the fight when at the last moment orders 
came up that they were not to participate, as their 
training for battle was not completed. Neverthe- 
less, they went over the top with the Australians, 
who are reported to have said of them that the 
Americans were good lads but too rough ! 

With this fortunate experiment faith in the tanks 
spread. The commanders already believed in them, 
and now that belief in their power to "make good" 
spread to the ranks. Nor was this the only good 
which the action of Hamel brought us. Our reverses 
in the spring had naturally affected the morale of the 
army. The men had never wavered in their deter- 
mination to hold on, to "stick it out", but their 

88 



Foch versus Ludendorff 



confidence in their superiority over the enemy and in 
their power to drive him back had been shaken when 
they saw him gaining more ground and making 
larger captures than either we or the French had 
ever succeeded in doing. It was as essential to 
restore that confidence before we could hope to 
attack successfully on a great scale as it was to 
establish confidence between tanks and infantry. 
Rawlinson, ia a series of minor operations, of which 
Hamel was the latest and the most successful, 
shook the enemy's confidence and built up that of 
his own men, and the brilliant work of the tanks 
added the last touch, so that when the crisis came 
both men and material were ready. Tanks made 
surprise, that greatest weapon of generalship, much 
easier than it had been ; they saved life and econo- 
mised troops, and, therefore, that quick succession 
of punches for which Foch was seeking his opportu- 
nity became possible. The artist had his materials 
to hand. Honour to him that he knew how to use 
them. 



89 



CHAPTER III 

The Preparation for Armageddon 

The Second Battle of the Marne — Haig's 
Offensive — The Americans at St. Mihiel 

Ludendorff's Friedensturm was to be developed 
from the salient with its head at Chateau-Thierry 
on the Marne, which the German Crown Prince 
had made in his May attack. The Germans had 
spent the time since that attack was stopped in 
training their men for just such another assault, 
and proposed again to pour in a mass of troops 
wherever they could make a hole in the Allied de- 
fenses. But railways are necessary to keep a mass 
of troops supplied with their needs in battle, and it 
happened that the only railways which could be 
used to supply the German troops in the Chateau- 
Thierry salient passed through the town of Soissons, 
which lay in the northwest corner of the salient 
not far from the German front line. For his advance 
upon Paris Ludendorff wanted railways on the east- 
ern side of the salient as well. Therefore, the first 
part of his plan involved the capture of Reims, 
so that he might repair and use the railways running 
through that city. He intended to capture Reims 

90 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

by a big attack delivered on the Champagne front 
to the east of the town, combined with another 
attack to the southwest of Reims. These attacks 
were designed to unite on the river Marne near 
Epernay and thus cut off Reims and all the troops 
defending it. Simultaneously, a third attack was 
to be made southwards across the Marne between 
Chateau-Thierry and Dormans. When these at- 
tacks had all developed satisfactorily the German 
troops on the western face of the salient between 
Soissons and Chateau-Thierry were to come in and 
cooperate in the advance upon Paris, and for this 
purpose their troops were, at the beginning of 
July, reorganised under a general and staff recently 
brought across from the Russian front. This was 
a big scheme, but there is evidence that it was in- 
tended to be still bigger and that Ludendorff pro- 
posed, when his movement against Paris astride 
the Marne was in full swing, to develop yet another 
attack upon Paris from the north by issuing from 
the Amiens salient which he had created in March, 
and that farther north still Rupprecht was prepar- 
ing for an advance in Flanders. 

Probably owing to the carelessness engendered by 
over-confidence the Germans took fewer pains to con- 
ceal their intentions before this battle than they had 
done earlier in the year, and Foch was ready for 
Ludendorff's first moves, which opened on July 15.^ 

1 Ludendorff says that before the battle the coming attack near Reims 
was talked of throughout Germany. Ludendorff, p. 535. 

91 



The Last Four Months 



The great attack to the east of Reims fell upon the 
army of General Gouraud, who adopted and improved 
upon the same defensive tactics as we had intended to 
use against the Germans in the March battles, but 
had been prevented by the fog from applying success- 
fully with the single exception of the battle on the 
Arras front on March 28. Gouraud, applying these 
tactics with better fortune and great skill, foiled 
the enemy's plans. He had the good luck to cap- 
ture a party of Germans on the eve of the attack, 
and from these prisoners he ascertained the exact 
time at which the bombardment would open and the 
enemy's infantry advance. He left in his front 
trenches only a few troops to watch for and break 
up the German assault, and withdrew his main 
line of resistance behind the area swept by the 
full storm of the hostile bombardment, while his own 
guns, which had been reinforced, poured a tornado 
of shell upon the German infantry as it moved for- 
ward, with the result that it was a disordered mass 
of field-greys which flung itself against the French 
battle positions, and except at two points on either 
flank of the attack these withstood the shock. The 
small breaches which the Germans succeeded in 
making were quickly closed, and the attack ended 
for them in a disastrous defeat. 

This brilliant defense by Gouraud, in the centre 
of whose army stood part of the 42nd American 
Division, laid the foundation for our subsequent 
victories and of itself was sufficient to cause the 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

failure of Ludendorff's plan, for one arm of the 
pincers with which he had intended to nip out 
Reims had failed to act. Twenty-five picked 
German divisions specially rested and trained for 
the enterprise had been shattered. Throughout 
the three and a half years of trench warfare on the 
Western Front no attack made on such a scale had 
met with so little success. It had come to be re- 
garded as inevitable that the defender should lose 
ground, prisoners and guns. Gouraud lost very 
little more ground than that which he had deliber- 
ately abandoned to the enemy, few prisoners and 
no guns. 

While these events were taking place to the east 
of Reims the Germans, in their remaining two 
attacks southwest of the city and across the Marne 
between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans, did make 
some progress, and before Foch struck back he wished 
to see that front steadied. It was steadied mainly 
by the firm courage of the American troops who 
formed part of General Degoutte's army, and partic- 
ularly of the 3rd and 28th American Divisions, 
which held the sector east of Chateau-Thierry, 
and the stout resistance of Berthelot's army on the 
heights south of Reims. On the seventh it looked 
to be possible for a time that the Germans would 
force their way up the Marne valley to Epernay, 
but the gap which they had made was not wide 
enough and they were in the position of a man who 
has got his head through a fence but finds the hole 

93 



The Last Four Months 



too small for his body. Then, on the fourth day of 
the battle, July 18, Foch sprung his first surprise 
upon the Germans. While the enemy were still 
trying to make progress from the southern and 
eastern faces of the Marne salient, General Mangin 
attacked the western face between Soissons and 
Chateau-Thierry. It required great courage and 
determination to make that attack as it was made. 
The Germans had still a superiority of more than 
250,000 infantry on the Western Front, and Foch, 
as well as Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Douglas Haig, 
had to take risks. When the first plans for that 
counter-stroke were made by the French generals 
on the spot they considered that the most which 
they could do was to attack on a front of some 
twelve miles. Foch came down and insisted that 
the front of attack should be more than doubled. 
"We haven't the men!" said the French generals. 
"I know that," replied Foch; "still you must 
attack the whole of the German flank." The spirit 
which turned the first battle of the Marne into a 
decisive victory for the Allies was to win in the 
second battle of the Marne another triumph. 

The popular faith in Foch's army of manoeuvre 
led to the belief that the Generalissimo had brought 
up large reinforcements of fresh troops at the right 
moment and had overwhelmed the Germans with 
superior numbers. This was very far from being 
the case, and Foch had, in fact, at his disposal 
few troops who could by any stretch of imagination 

94 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

be called fresh. The French divisions were tired 
by the long defensive struggle which followed on 
Ithe Crown Prince's May attack. The 1st Ameri- 
can Division was on its way to a well deserved rest 
after a long spell in the line om the Montdidier 
front, the 2nd American Division had only been 
relieved in the first week of July after its bitter 
struggle in Belleu Wood. Of all the Allied troops on 
the western side of the German salient only the 26tli 
American Division, which had taken the place of the 
2nd north of the Marne, was unwearied by its previ- 
ous efforts. But Pershing was as convinced as was 
Foch himself of the importance of a counter-attack 
against the German flank and insisted that his 1st 
and 2nd Divisions could and would fight and they 
were brought up to strengthen Mangin's battle. 
The 1st American Division only reached its posi- 
tions on the evening of the seventeenth, while part 
of the 2nd Division did not come up till the attack 
was actually in progress. The late arrival of this 
important reinforcement helped to keep the Ger- 
mans in the dark as to what was afoot and Mangin 
was able to use the great forests of Villers-Cotterets, 
which lay behind his post, to screen his preparations. 
His method was adapted from those employed by 
Haig at Cambrai in the previous November. He 
opened with a very short but intense bombardment 
which lasted just long enough to drive the Ger- 
mans to their dug-outs and to cut their telephone 
communication. Then a mass of tanks followed 



The Last Four Months 



the barrage through the German defenses, to be 
followed in turn by a rush of French and American 
infantry. The Germans were taken completely 
by surprise.^ They had been thinking only of their 
advance to Paris, and had neglected their trenches, 
with the result that there were none of the formi- 
dable rear lines of defense which they had been wont 
to throw up rapidly and skilfully with the aid of 
the forced labour of the French peasants and of 
prisoners of war.^ Mangin's chief object was to get 
a position from which he could prevent the Germans 
from using the railways passing through Soissons. 
His main effort had been made between the Aisne 
and the Ourcq, the front of battle being extended 
south of that river by a French division and the 
26th American Division. By the evening of July 19 
Mangin's guns dominated both the railway junc- 
tion and also the main road connecting Soissons and 
Chateau-Thierry. 

Ludendorff had failed to get Reims, and now had 
lost the use of the one artery of supply which enabled 
him to maintain the great mass of troops he had 
crowded into the Marne salient. His troops across 
the river, struggling hard to maintain what they had 

^ Ludendorff mentions that two deserters came over to the Germans 
on the eleventh and said that a great tank attack was in preparation in 
the Villers-Cotteret forest. As the days passed and nothing happened, the 
Germans appear to have believed that this was a false alarm. Luden- 
dorff, p. 534. 

2 Ludendorff makes the influenza epidemic largely responsible for this 
neglect. Ihid. 

96 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

won, were at once in difficulties, and there was 
nothing left but to withdraw them. That with- 
drawal was not easy, for a Franco-American counter- 
attack had given the Allies possession of heights 
on the south bank of the river, from which many of 
the bridges thrown by the Germans could be shelled, 
while the enemy's infantry was continually harassed 
by attacks from the air. 

Now, as I have explained, the principle upon 
which Foch had determined to act was to deliver a 
series of punches, each with a definite but limited 
object. His idea was to press the enemy so long as 
he gave way before the punch, but to avoid a slow, 
protracted struggle when the German resistance 
began to harden. So Mangin, having achieved his 
purpose of taking the railways through Soissons, 
stopped, rested and relieved his troops, and it fell to 
Degoutte to attack next in a northeasterly direction 
from the Chateau-Thierry front against the Germans 
yielding on the Marne. The fresh vigour of the 
Americans — 28th, 3rd and 26th Divisions, with the 
4th and 32nd in support — swept the enemy back 
from the Marne to the Ourcq, behind which river 
they attempted to stand between Oulchy-le- Chateau 
and Fere-en-Tardenois. Simultaneously, two of the 
four British divisions sent down from the north by 
Haig, the 51st and 62nd, reinforced the French and 
Italian forces on the eastern side of the salient, and 
there, too, but more slowly, the Germans were com- 
pelled to give ground. Meantime, the two remaining 

97 



The Last Four Months 



British divisions, the 15th and the 34 th,^ joined Man- 
gin, who, on July 23, was ready for another blow. 
This was delivered between the Ourcq and Soissons, 
and threatened the flank of the Germans opposed to 
Degoutte on the Ourcq. Degoutte's army had been 
reinforced by the transfer to it of the 42nd Ameri- 
can Division from Gouraud, which relieved the 26th, 
and by the appearance in the front line of the 32nd 
American Division, which relieved the 3rd, and 
under this combined pressure from the west and the 
south the German defense between the Ourcq and 
the Aisne gradually broke down. 

On July 26 the 15th Scottish Division captured 
Buzancy east of the main Soissons-Chateau-Thierry 
road, and Degoutte was able to enter Fere-en-Tarde- 
nois. Then followed two days of fierce German 
counter-attack delivered by reinforcements sent 
southward by Rupprecht. These attacks were a last 
attempt by the Germans to hold the north side of 
the Ourcq valley, and they were broken by the 
American 32nd and 42nd Divisions. On July 31 
the last crisis of the battle was over and the whole 
valley of the Ourcq had been won by Degoutte. 

Ludendorff now found that he was left with no 
leisure to restore his lines of supply, that the salient 
was daily getting narrower, and that congestion and 

^ The 51st Division was the Highland Territorial Division, the 62d 
the West Yorkshire Territorials, the 15th a Scottish division of the 
"second hundred thousand," the 34th had been reformed of hattaliona 
from Palestbe 

98 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

confusion within it left him no alternative but to 
come out of it altogether. Accordingly, he retreated 
behind the Vesle and Aisne, pressed on all sides by 
the Allied forces, which had been strengthened by 
the 77th American Division. The Germans got 
across the rivers in the first days of August with the 
loss of 40,000 prisoners and over 400 guns. Paris 
was relieved of the menace which had hung over 
her for six weeks, and a second time the Marne had 
proved fatal to German hopes. It is one of the 
remarkable coincidences of the war that twice, 
confident of victory, the Germans should have 
crossed the Marne, neglecting to protect their right 
flank, and that twice a blow against that neglected 
flank should have brought their offensives to ruin. 
It is little less remarkable that in the first battle 
of the Marne the first five divisions of the British 
army, crossing the river near Chateau-Thierry in 
their first offensive campaign after the retreat 
from Mons, should have advanced northeastwards 
through Oulchy-le-Chateau and Fere-en-Tardenois 
to the Vesle and the Aisne, and that the first Ameri- 
can divisions to take part in an offensive battle 
should have traversed exactly the same ground. 

The Germans behind the Vesle and the Aisne 
were posted in strong positions ; by withdrawing 
from the salient they had extricated themselves from 
the difficulties in which Mangin's blow at Soissons 
had placed them and were ready to put up a strong 
resistance. Foch thereupon tossed the ball to Sir 

99 



The Last Four Months 



Douglas Haig, who, on August 8, attacked the 
enemy on the Amiens front. In the battle of Amiens 
the 3rd British Corps, with which was a regiment of 
the 33rd American Division, the Australian and the 
Canadian Corps, belonging to the Fourth British 
Army under Sir Henry Rawlinson, attacked the west- 
ern face of the great salient, which the Germans had 
driven into our front in March, on a front of about 
eleven miles, while the First French Army, com- 
manded by General Debeney and placed by Foch 
under Haig's orders, prolonged the front of battle by 
about four miles to the south. The plan of attack, 
like Mangin's, was based on the experience gained 
at Hamel and on what we had learned from Luden- 
dorff's methods in the battle of March 21. I have 
described how, on that day, the Germans opened a 
sudden and intense bombardment from a mass of 
guns brought up secretly at the last moment, and 
how they profited from the heavy fog which en- 
veloped the battlefield. In the early years of the 
war fog or bad weather of any kind had been regarded 
as a fatal obstacle to successful attack, because it 
blinded the gunners and prevented them from creat- 
ing the breach for the infantry assault. Time and 
again in the early days of trench warfare, when the 
Germans were firing five shells to our one, a day of 
fog had been hailed by our infantry with joy as a day 
of rest and of relief from shell-fire. Time and again 
attacks planned by us and by our French Allies were 
postponed because the weather conditions made it 

100 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

difficult, or even impossible, for the artillery to ascer- 
tain by preliminary trial the exact adjustment of their 
guns needed for the bombardment of the targets 
allotted to them. This process of registration of 
targets had been regarded as an indispensable pre- 
liminary of battle, and when a great mass of guns 
was to be employed it was a slow and elaborate 
business. Time and again it had given us warning of 
the enemy's intention to attack and had warned the 
enemy that we were preparing to attack him ; it was 
one of the factors which had made it all but im- 
possible to achieve surprise. But by 1918 the 
development of scientific gunnery had made it 
possible to ascertain for the gunners beforehand the 
exact adjustment required to enable them to reach 
any given target under any reasonable conditions 
of weather. So the slow process of registration 
became unnecessary. It was possible to open a 
great bombardment without previously alarming 
the enemy, and, best of all, the attackers became 
far more independent of the weather than they had 
ever been. Fog became an aid instead of an im- 
pediment to attack, because, under its protection, 
guns, tanks and infantry could be massed unseen. 

So for this battle of August 8 two thousand guns 
were collected on Rawlinson's front of attack, many 
of them being brought into action at the last moment, 
and hardly any had opened fire from their new 
positions before they all crashed out together. A 
friendly mist covered the final assembly of the 

101 



The Last Four Months 



assaulting troops and of the tanks, and these burst 
through the enemy's lines almost simultaneously with 
the opening of the bombardment which rolled on 
ahead of them in the form of a crushing barrage. In 
no battle of the war was the power of the tank better 
displayed. The tank of the summer of 1918 was, in 
speed, ability to overcome obstacles and turn quickly 
in any direction, a vastly improved machine from 
that of the Somme battle of 1916. About two 
hundred of these were employed, and they not only 
during the battle drove avenues for the advance 
of the infantry through the German defenses, over- 
came their nests of machine-guns and spread de- 
moralisation in the German ranks, but, by thus 
relieving the artillery of many of the complicated 
tasks which had formerly fallen to them in helping 
the infantry forward, they also he ped the process 
of simplifying and speeding up the preparations for 
battle. 

Haig's first orders to Rawlinson to prepare for 
battle went out on July 13, a little over three weeks 
before the attack, while the preliminaries for the great 
attacks, which in former years had begun with days 
of shelling, had taken months. It had in these cir- 
cumstances been impossible to keep secret from the 
army what was intended. Talk of the "next push" 
went on in every mess, and as sick and wounded men 
on leave came home items of information were 
pieced together. So London usually had before- 
hand a very fair idea of what was afoot, and we may 

102 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

be reasonably certain that what was known in 
England was also known at the enemy's head- 
quarters. But the speed with which the battle of 
Amiens was prepared made it much easier to pre- 
serve secrecy, and the army had very little notion of 
what Haig and Rawlinson were planning. The 
men of the Canadian Corps who were brought down 
from Arras at the last moment had no idea where 
they were going. Their hospitals had been sent 
north into Flanders, and the most circumstantial 
reports were in circulation that the Canadians were 
going to join Plumer for a great attack on the Ypres 
front. Canadian battalions were put into the line 
on the Kemmel front, where they were identified 
by the enemy. Even King Albert was deceived, and 
inquired indignantly why he had not been told of this 
offensive which was about to take place on his right. 
There were no rumours to attract the enemy's atten- 
tion towards Amiens and many to draw it elsewhere. 
The result was that Rawlinson sprang an even 
more complete surprise upon the enemy than had 
Byng at Cambrai. The tanks, lumbering forward 
through the mist, were through the German defenses 
and amongst the troops in the fields and billets be- 
hind before they were aware that any attack had 
taken place. The headquarters of regiments, and even 
in one case of a division, were surprised, and the tanks 
did invaluable service in cutting the German tele- 
graph and telephone communications. One of our 
whippets, on the first morning, got through to a 

103 



The Last Four Months 



depth of more than six miles behind the front and, 
though quite alone, succeeded in causing rare havoc 
to the German wires before it was surrounded and its 
occupants were forced to surrender. The cavalry, 
following hard after the tanks, made many captures 
and completed the demoralisation of the enemy. 
Owing to the disorganisation of their means of com- 
munication and the difficulty which the German 
generals had in ascertaining what was happening and 
in sending out their orders, control for a time broke 
down, and this, in conjunction with the alarm spread 
by our tanks, seriously affected the morale of the 
German troops. Ludendorff says that August 8 was 
the black day in the history of the German Army, 
and Colonel Bauer, the head of Ludendorff's artillery 
section at headquarters, in his account of the negotia- 
tions between his chief and the German Government, 
speaks of "the events of the inglorious eighth of 
August." The work begun at Hamel was completed, 
and the moral ascendancy established by tanks, ar- 
tillery and infantry working in combination affected 
both private and general in the German army. By 
August 10 the Australians and Canadians had, with 
the help of the Cavalry Corps, broken through the 
German lines to a depth of twelve miles. 

North of the Somme the 3rd Corps had had a 
harder struggle, for the enemy there was on the 
alert, the surprise was not complete, and the nature of 
the ground made it impossible to use tanks but none 
the less the greater part of the ridge dividing the 

104 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

Ancre south of Albert from the Somme was gained. 
Twenty German divisions had been defeated by 
thirteen British infantry divisions, three British 
cavalry divisions, and an American infantry regi- 
ment, and nearly twenty-two thousand prisoners 
and four hundred guns were captured. The imme- 
diate effect of the advance of the Australians and 
Canadians south of the Somme was very similar to 
that of Mangin's blow at Soissons. The Germans 
were deprived of the use of the railways passing 
through Chaulnes, which had supplied their troops 
between the Somme and the Oise, and had to carry 
through another withdrawal. Debeney, who was not 
aided by tanks to the same extent as we were and had 
very difficult country to traverse, at first made slower 
progress than did the Canadians on his left, but as the 
difficulties of the Germans increased, owing to the 
threat of the Canadian attack to their communica- 
tions, not only was Debeney able to press forward 
towards Roye, but Humbert, on his right, joined in 
and drove the enemy back from the Lassigny plateau, 
which had been won by von Hutier in June, so that 
by the middle of August the Germans between the 
Somme and the Oise were almost everywhere back in 
the lines which they had held in the summer of 1916. 
Then, in accordance with the theory of limited 
punches, the attack was stayed. The Amiens sali- 
ent had disappeared, as had the Marne salient, and 
the main lines of railway through Amiens, which the 
enemy had dominated since the end of March and 

105 



The Last Four Months 



which were the main channels of communication be- 
tween the French and British armies, were cleared. 

No sooner was Humbert established on the 
Lassigny plateau, and the battle-front on the Amiens 
salient for the time being at a standstill, than Mangin 
on Humbert's right opened an attack between the 
Oise and the Aisne at Soissons. Mangin began on 
the eighteenth with a local operation which sent 
the Germans back into their battle positions, but 
did not alarm von Boehn sufficiently to cause him 
to send up reserves, of which he had none too many. 
Von Boehn had just assumed command of the 
armies which had hitherto constituted the German 
Crown Prince's right, in order that that young 
gentleman might be better able to devote his atten- 
tion to the reorganisation of his centre after the 
buffeting it had received in the second battle of the 
Marne. Von Boehn's front extended from Soissons 
to Albert, and he was anxiously watching Haig. He 
did not, therefore, wish to send off troops prema- 
turely to his left, and Mangin caught him napping. 
On the nineteenth Mangin extended his front of at- 
tack, and by the twentieth had gained possession of 
the whole of the heights between the Oise and 
the Aisne, having captured 8,000 prisoners and 200 
guns. 

Foch's system of manoeuvre was now in action, 
and it is worth while again pausing for a moment to 
compare his quick rapier thrusts with Ludendorff's 
heavier and slower sword play. It will be re- 

106 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

membered that Ludendorff's attacks on the British 
front, begun on March 21, had ended on April 29 
with the repulse between Bailleul and Ypres. Then 
ensued a pause of twenty-seven days, for the third 
battle of the Aisne did not begin until May 27. 
This ended on June 2, and was followed after a 
week's interval by von Hutier's attempt to reach 
Compiegne, which was stopped on June 13. It was 
not until July 15, thirty -two days later, that the 
Crown Prince was ready to begin the second battle 
of the Marne, and each of these respites which 
Ludendorff had allowed the Allies made his next 
task the more difficult. Now see how Foch, who 
had not the superiority which Ludendorff had had 
in the spring, gave his adversary no time to recover. 
He makes his counter-attack on July 18, and the 
second battle of the Marne ends with the Germans 
behind the Aisne and the Vesle on August 6. On 
August 8 Haig opens the battle of Amiens, and on 
the twelfth it ends with the Germans in their lines 
about Chaulnes. Meanwhile, on the ninth, Hum- 
bert has already begun the battle of Lassigny, which 
comes to an end on the sixteenth, and from the 
seventeenth to the twentieth Mangin is driving the 
Germans from the Aisne heights. As soon as he 
stops, Byng, on August 21, begins the battle of 
Bapaume ; but ere that Foch's strategy had effected 
a vital change in the enemy's plans. 

Haig's victory of Amiens gave rise to anxious 
debates at German Headquarters. The blow had 

107 



The Last Four Months 



been utterly unexpected, and the revelation that the 
British army had so quickly recovered its fighting 
power came as a great shock. Ludendorff was 
so overwhelmed that he tendered his resignation, 
which was refused. He has stated that Haig's vic- 
tory had convinced him that there was no longer 
any hope of German victory, and he at once ad- 
vised his Government to seek the best terms which 
they could obtain from their enemies.^ On August 
14 a conference was held at Great Headquarters at 
which both the Chancellor and the Foreign Minister 
were present, and over which the Emperor presided. 
Ludendorff then expounded his views on the military 
situation, and declared that, while the army could 
still for a time present a strong front, the military 
situation could never be better than it then was. He 
urged that the best course for Germany was to pro- 
pose terms while she still occupied large stretches of 
the territory of her enemies and while the process of 
driving the German troops out of them was likely to 
prove long and costly. Such a change of front, coming 
so soon after the promises of victory which on Lu- 
dendorff's authority had been held out to Germany, 
filled the German statesmen with dismay. It was 
held that to undeceive the people so bluntly and 
brutally was politically impossible, and the nego- 
tiations which resulted in Prince Max of Baden 
becoming Chancellor were set on foot. 

While the Emperor and his advisers were thus 

^ Ludendorff, pp. 551 et seq. 

108 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

seeking for a way out of their difficulties Ludendorff 
changed his mihtary pohcy. His purpose was now 
to stand on the defensive, to avoid exposing his 
troops to any more such defeats as he had recently 
suffered, and to present a barrier to the Allies which 
they would hesitate to attack. He had had again 
to draw heavily upon Rupprecht's reserves to stop 
the hole caused by the collapse of his defense in 
the Amiens salient, and it had become imperative 
that he should economise troops somehow. He 
therefore decided on a general shortening of his 
front. He began to draw out of the salient he had 
made in Flanders in April, and attempted to follow 
this by a repetition of the manoeuvre which had 
been so successful at the beginning of 1917. Then 
he had upset General Nivelle's plan by a withdrawal 
into the Hindenburg line, and now he proposed to 
retire slowly over the same ground to the shelter 
of the same vast system of defenses, in which he 
hoped to stand until a peace not unfavourable to 
Germany had been concluded As in 1917, he wished 
this retirement to be deliberate and to cause us the 
maximum of delay and inconvenience. It would 
have suited him admirably to have completed the 
movement about the time when the weather broke 
in the later autumn. We would then have been left 
without shelter in the desert of the old Somme 
battle-fields, while his troops were established in the 
elaborate dug-outs of the Hindenburg system or 
billeted in the intact towns and villages to the east 

109 



The Last Four Months 



of it. Fortunately, Haig divined this scheme. At 
this time the Hindenburg Hne ran much nearer to 
our front between Albert and Arras than it did in 
the Somme valley, and Haig proposed to upset 
Ludendorff's plan of retreat, to force him out of 
the Somme uplands and turn the line of the river 
from Peronne southwards, by striking from the 
Albert- Arras front through Bapaume towards the 
nearest portion of Ludendorff's goal. 

On the eve of the battle of Bapaume, which, as 
I have said, began on August 21, Haig issued an 
order to his troops which, while hinting at the prob- 
ability of a German withdrawal, called their attention 
to the great change which had been wrought by the 
victories of the Marne and of Amiens, and asked for 
their greatest efforts in pressing back the enemy 
wherever he gave way. The brunt of this new battle 
fell upon Byng's Third Army, which had the task 
of pressing in north of the Ancre towards Bapaume, 
while Rav\^linson's Fourth Army cooperated on its 
right by advancing astride the Somme on Peronne. 
By the evening of the twenty-first the success of 
Haig's plan was practically assured by Byng who 
gained the line of the Albert- Arras railway. The 
consequence was that, when on the twenty-third a 
general attack on the whole front of the Third and 
Fourth Armies followed, the German defense north 
of the Somme gave way, and the Thiepval Ridge, 
Pozieres, Courcelette, Martinpuich and Miraumont 
fell in rapid succession to Byng's men. The effect 

HO 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

of this upon our men was electric. In 1916 the 
capture of each of these places had cost us a long, 
slow, bloody struggle, and the prime manhood of our 
new armies lay buried thick around them. They 
are names as sacred to the National Army of Great 
Britain as Minden, Salamanca, Waterloo and the 
Alma are to the old Regular Army. They had been 
yielded in March in sorrow and pain after a noble 
defense against odds. Now, in a few hours and at 
comparatively small cost, the same regiments which 
had perforce retreated from them with heavy hearts 
had once more thrown the enemy back from this 
sacred soil. No one who has not tasted the bitter- 
ness of retreat can appreciate the full thrill of an 
advance over ground made familiar by victory and 
defeat. Times had indeed changed from the days 
of the first battle of the Somme. The army was 
from long experience suspicious of announcements 
from Headquarters which foretold the collapse of 
the enemy. Too often these had come to men who 
had seen them falsified by a stubborn and skilful 
foe, but now Haig was clearly right. The day had 
come to strike swiftly and boldly, and with new 
confidence in themselves and in their chief our men 
pressed forward across the horrid desolation created 
by Hun savagery and by the still more terrible ebb 
and flow of war. 

The Germans strove hard to gain time to carry 
through the ordered retreat which they had planned, 
their machine-gunners in particular fighting with 

111 



The Last Four Months 



that devotion which marked them throughout the 
war; but we had now found the answer to the 
German machine-gun, and one hundred tanks had 
been sent by Haig into the battle to help the infantry- 
forward. By August 26 Byng's progress in the north 
had, as Haig had expected it would, begun to make 
the Germans anxious for the safety of their troops 
between the Somme and the Oise, and these too 
retreated, followed by Rawlinson's Fourth Army and 
the French armies under Debeney and Humbert. 
By the night of the twenty-ninth Rawlinson's men 
had reached the left bank of the Somme opposite 
Peronne, Debeney had hustled the Germans through 
Nesle, and Humbert had occupied Noyon. On this 
same day the Germans evacuated Bapaume, which 
Byng was encircling from the north and south, and 
were driven completely from the Somme plateau. 
The battle was brought to a noble close by one of 
the most brilliant feats of arms of the whole war. 
While Byng had been closing in on Bapaume the 
Australian Corps had been steadily pushing the 
Germans back up the Somme towards Peronne, and 
in the early hours of August 31 the 5th Australian 
Brigade, having crossed the river on improvised 
bridges and worked their way to the north of Mont 
St. Quentin, surprised the German defenders of that 
hill, which dominates Peronne, and carried it by 
assault. As the result of this achievement the 
Australians were able to enter Peronne the following 
day and the German defenses along the Somme as 

112 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

far south as Ham were turned. In the battle of 
Bapaume thirty-five German divisions had been 
driven in ten days across the scene of the struggle 
which in 1916 had lasted from July 1 until Novem- 
ber 17, and they had lost 34,000 prisoners and 
270 guns. Ludendorff's retreat, far from enabling 
him to economise troops, was exhausting his dwin- 
dling resources as rapidly as a battle accepted vol- 
untarily. 

While the battle of Bapaume was in progress 
Haig had been quietly transferring the Canadian 
Corps from the Amiens battlefield back to Arras, 
whence it had come, and on August 26 the 2nd 
and 3rd Canadian Divisions, with the 51st British 
Division, which had moved noith from the Marne, 
attacked east of Arras and captured the im- 
portant hill of Monchy le Preux. Home's First 
Army, to which these divisions belonged, followed up 
this success by driving the enemy back into the 
northern extension of the Hindenburg line, known 
as the Drocourt-Queant switch. This Drocourt line 
had been completed by the enemy after the battle 
of Arras, in April, 1917, and for eighteen months 
he had been hard at work improving it until it had 
become almost as formidable as the main Hindenburg 
line, with which it connected at Queant. It was 
assaulted in the morning of September 2 by the 1st 
and 4th Canadian Divisions and the 4th, 52nd, 57th 
and 63rd British Divisions, assisted by some forty 
tanlcs. These six divisions not only broke clear 

113 



The Last Four Months 



through the network of German defenses and gained 
possession of the whole system in less than seven 
hours, but in doing so they routed nine German 
divisions, who had all the advantage of defensive 
works which they knew thoroughly and believed to 
be impregnable. This great feat had, as Haig had 
hoped it would, far-reaching results. With their 
right flank threatened, the Germans south of Queant 
had to hurry back to the shelter of the Hindenburg 
line, and by September 9 they were back in the out- 
post positions in front of their main defensive system. 
On September 6 the French occupied Ham, on the 
Somme, and Chauny, on the Oise, and a few days 
later were within sight of La Fere. Haig's manoeu- 
vre had the simultaneous effect of hastening the 
German withdrawal in Flanders, and by September 
6 we had reoccupied Bailleul and Merville and were 
back in Neuve Chapelle, while the 27th American 
Division had passed beyond Kemmel Hill. Thus 
in one month all the ground won by Ludendorff in 
his first two attacks of March and April had, with 
the exception of a portion on the Ypres front, been 
regained, and the British army had amply avenged 
the reverses of the spring. 

The two German attempts to derange the plans of 
the Allies by a retreat into the Hindenburg line 
had had very different results. In 1917 we did not 
discover what they were at until their preparations 
had been completed. Their retreat then lasted 
almost exactly three months, and during that three 

114 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

months we fought the battle of Arras, in which the 
Canadians stormed the Vimy Ridge. That was the 
most conspicuous success we had gained up to that 
time on the Western Front, and, including our cap- 
tures in that victory, we, in those three months, 
secured about 21,000 prisoners and 220 guns, an 
achievement of which we were at the time rightly 
very proud. In 1918, when Ludendorfl again tried 
to escape from his embarrassments by a similar 
retreat, we drove the Germans back over almost 
exactly the same distance between August 21 and 
September 9 — that is, ip twenty days — and in 
that time we captured 53,000 prisoners and 470 guns. 
Ludendorff could no longer retreat according to plan. 
While Haig was hunting the Germans back int6 
the Hindenburg line Pershing was engaged in collect- 
ing his scattered divisions, in forming them into the 
First American Army, of which he assumed personal 
command, and in establishing an American sector of 
the front. This by the end of August extended round 
the St. Mihiel salient northwards to a point oppo- 
site Verdun. The St. Mihiel salient was a relic of the 
first German offensive of 1914. In an attempt to 
break through to the south of Verdun the enemy had 
in September of that year gained possession of a 
portion of the heights of the Meuse, including the 
Fort of the Roman Camp and the little town of St. 
Mihiel on the river below it. The heights of the 
Meuse were part of the defensive system of the 
eastern frontier of France, and along them had been 

115 



The Last Four Months 



constructed a chain of forts connecting the fortresses 
of Verdun and Toul, of which the Fort of the Roman 
Camp was one. Though on the map the St. Mihiel 
saHent looked to be a narrow wedge which could be 
swept by shell fire from both flanks, in reality the 
wooded heights afforded the enemy splendid shelter 
and gave him commanding positions of exceptional 
strength which dominated all the approaches. In 
1915 Joffre had tried again and again to drive the 
Germans out, and both Les Eparges, on the north- 
west corner of the salient, and Apremont, on its 
southern face, became names of ill-omen in the 
French army. Thereafter the French left the salient 
alone, and it became a quiet sector of the front. 

In September, 1918, the St. Mihiel salient was 
held by nine German and Austrian divisions, of 
whom six were second-class troops. Ludendorff 
had decided to withdraw to the base of the 
salient in order to economise troops, and some of the 
German heavy artillery had been removed before the 
Americans attacked. Probably the enemy relied 
upon the strength of his position and upon the ease 
with which he could observe all preparations for 
attack to enable him to make a leisurely retirement 
at the proper moment. If this is so, he was sur- 
prised by the method and swiftness of the American 
advance, which began on September 12. The main 
attack was made by the 1st Corps of four divisions 
and the 4th Corps of three divisions against the 
southern face of the salient, and was directed north- 

116 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

wards so as to cut in east of the heights of the Meuse. 
Simultaneously the 5th American Corps attacked 
with two divisions on the northwestern front of the 
salient and drove in eastwards towards the southern 
attack. One French division attacked on the left 
of the 5th Corps, and two more connected the 5th 
Corps round the nose of the salient at St. Mihiel 
with the main attack. The battle opened with a 
four hours' bombardment, and then, at five in the 
morning, the American infantry advanced behind 
their barrage. Either because the morale of the 
German troops was not goo(i or because they knew 
that it had been planned to come out of the salient, 
the resistance was on the whole feeble, and in thirty 
hours the two American attacking forces had joined 
hands and the salient had been wiped out with 
astonishingly little loss. The whole operation was 
carried through according to programme. It was 
not necessary to employ any of the American reserve 
divisions, of which six were in readiness, and, as 
will be seen, they were at once available to begin 
preparations for another and more formidable task. 
The battle resulted in the capture by the First 
American Army of 16,000 prisoners and 443 guns. 
The St. Mihiel salient had long broken up the 
stretch of front between the Moselle and Verdun, so 
that any considerable offensive movement by the 
French into Lorraine had been impossible. The 
front was equally unpromising from the German 
point of view for an attack directed against Nancy. 

117 



The Last Four Months 



The result of this was that this portion of the long 
line had, after the failure of Joffre's attempts in 1915 
to reduce the salient, become dormant and had been 
very lightly held by both sides. But now that the 
salient was gone and the front had been straightened 
out, the Germans found their great fortress of Metz 
menaced with attack, and also the French iron fields 
of Briey, to the north of Metz, which they had cap- 
tured in the early days of the war, and which were 
of even more importance to them than the fortress. 
American Headquarters allowed it to be whispered 
in confidence that Pershing's real objective was these 
iron fields, and doubtless some of these whispers 
found their way into the German lines. In any event 
Ludendorff, almost to the very end, shov/ed his 
nervousness as to an American attack on the east 
bank of the Meuse, and, hard up as he was for 
reserves, he kept troops to watch for an attack which 
did not begin to develop until the German pleni- 
potentiaries were on their way to sign the Armistice. 
This victory of Pershing's completed the series of 
preliminary punches, and Foch was now ready for 
the knock-out blow. His immediate object had been 
to free Paris and Amiens and to clear the strategic 
railways which he needed for the free movement of 
his troops ; his ultimate object had been to prepare 
for a decisive victory by exhausting the German 
reserves. We have seen how he achieved the first; 
let us now see how he stood as to the second. At 
the end of May, just before the Crown Prince 

118 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

William's attack on the Chemin-des-Dames, the 
German forces in the West had reached their greatest 
strength. They then had 207 divisions on the 
Western Front, and of these about 66 divisions fit to 
take part in battle were in reserve. In the third 
week of September, after Pershing's victory of St. 
Mihiel, the number of German divisions had fallen 
to 185, for in order to make good his heavy losses 
Ludendorff, whose income in man power from Ger- 
many was quite insufficient to meet expenditure, had 
been compelled to draw upop his capital, and to 
break up twenty-two of his divisions in an endeavour 
to keep the remainder up to strength. Two more 
divisions were on their way across from Russia and 
six others were placed under orders to move, but of 
these three had been directed to help Mackensen in 
the Balkans out of the difficulties in which he had 
been placed by the collapse of Bulgaria, and none of 
the remainder reached the front in France before the 
great battle was joined; they were, moreover, of 
poor quality, for all their best men had been taken 
from them to meet the never-ending call for drafts 
for the Western Front. Even these drastic measures 
proved insufficient, and none of Ludendorff's divisions 
had its full establishment of men, and he had to 
swallow his pride and appeal to despised Austria 
for aid, with the result that six Austrian divisions 
arrived on the Western Front, and of these two had 
been defeated at St. Mihiel. The reserve of sixty- 
six rested and fit divisions in May had fallen to 

119 



The Last Four Months 



nineteen in September and there were available to 
swell it only the five divisions coming from Russia. 

As I have already pointed out, this weakening of 
the German armies had not been due solely to Foch's 
skill. In part it was the consequence of Ludendorff's 
mistake in his spring campaign of compromising 
between the policy of a succession of attacks in- 
tended to prepare for a great final effort and the 
policy of attempting to break through in one great 
battle. He failed in the first by continuing his 
assaults beyond the period when he was inflicting 
more loss than he suffered, and he failed in the 
second because he would not or could not continue 
them to the point where decisive success was ob- 
tainable, and in acting as he did he sapped his 
strength. Still more was the exhaustion of Ger- 
many's man power the fruit of the Allied efforts 
during the previous years. It is easy in the light 
of after knowledge to criticise the Allied generals 
and to say that their methods were wasteful of life. 
Certainly if they had known in 1915 what they 
knew in 1918 their procedure would have been 
different and the war would have been over sooner ; 
but that criticism is best answered by the fact that 
the man who is to-day universally recognised as 
the outstanding figure of the war was himself en- 
gaged in doing that to which the critics object. 

It is commonly asserted that the Allies should 
have remained on the defensive in the West in 1915. 
That argument overlooks the fact that it was always 

120 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

present in Joffre's mind that the Germans might at 
any time elect to do the very thing which they came 
so near achieving in March, 1918. I beheve it to 
have been one of the greatest of the many German 
blunders that they did not attack in force in the 
West in 1915 before our new armies were ready and 
our ammunition factories had become really produc- 
tive. In 1916 Verdun was saved because we were 
able to extend our front to the Somme and free a 
great number of French troops. An attack made 
before we were in a position to bring such help to 
our Allies might have had very different results. 
The one means of averting that danger was to take 
every opportunity of making the Western Front more 
secure by pushing back the German line and of ex- 
hausting the military power of Germany. Here lies 
the root of the long barren controversy which raged 
between the "Easterners" and " Westerners *' through- 
out the greater part of the war. It was necessary 
to be safe in the East in order to be strong in the 
West, but it was at no time possible before the 
summer of 1918 to make the West safe by success 
in the East, because the Allies had not the force 
necessary to protect their vitals in the West against 
possible danger and at the same time carry through a 
decisive campaign in more distant fields. Therefore 
the policy of exhausting Germany's military power by 
attack in the West was the right policy if the methods 
followed were not always the best. It was that 
policy which emptied the depots in Germany, and 

121 



The Last Four Months 



though it came near to emptying both our own and 
the French depots, it had its reward in 1918, for 
without it neither could Foch's skill in two short 
months have materially reduced the enemy's strength 
nor could American aid have enabled us to win when 
we did win. 

While the German strength had been going 
steadily down, the Allied strength had been going 
steadily up. Between the middle of July and the 
beginning of August nine American divisions took 
part in the second battle of the Marne, and there 
were then three more on the British front, which 
had practically completed their training for battle. 
Pershing at the battle of St. Mihiel had fourteen 
divisions in action or in reserve, while at that time 
there were two on the British front and nine more 
almost ready, — twenty-five American divisions in 
all, upon which Foch could reckon at once, and more 
to come, each of these divisions being about twice 
the strength of a British, French or German division. 
The British army, which in July could only bring 
into the field fifty-three divisions, in September had, 
thanks to the arrival of reinforcements from other 
theatres of war, grown to fifty-nine divisions, two of 
which were, however, still in process of reorganisation. 
Thus while the fighting strength of the Germans 
and Austrians in the West had fallen by sixteen 
divisions since Foch had delivered his first punch, 
that of the Allies had increased by the equivalent of 
about thirty-two, counting one American division 

122 



The Preparation for Armageddon 

as equal to two German divisions. Since July 18 the 
Allies had captured more than 2000 German guns 
and large stocks of shell, while the blockade on which 
we had founded many premature hopes was at last 
beginning to have results directly bearing on the 
military situation and made it increasingly difficult 
for the Germans to replace their lost and damaged 
war material. For example, the mechanism of the 
German guns necessitated the use of brass cartridge 
cases, but by this time the supply of brass and copper 
in Germany had run very low, and the most elaborate 
and tyrannical system of perquisitions could extract 
no more from the occupied territories, so that in- 
ferior substitutes had to be used. The power and 
efficiency of the German artillery was diminishing 
as fast as the strength of these battalions, while the 
Allied guns had gone up from about 18,000 in May 
to 21,000 in September and they had almost un- 
limited supplies of munitions. 

But it was not in numbers and material alone that 
the Allies had gained. The German soldiers who 
had been sent over from Russia had come into touch 
with Bolshevist theory and practice. They had 
seen soldiers' committees in control and officers 
degraded and insulted, and it began to occur to them 
that the iron discipline under which they had been 
brought up had not behind it the power which they 
had imagined to be there. They infected their 
comrades with a distrust and suspicion of authority 
which spread rapidly as defeat followed on defeat 

123 



The Last Four Months 



and the promise of a speedy and victorious peace 
became a mockery. On the other side of the wire 
the success of Foch's strategy had filled France with 
joyful relief and inspired the Allied troops with 
confidence. The work begun at Doullens on March 
26 was completed, and for the first time in the war 
a real sense of corporate unity pervaded the ranks. 
The British army, having made one of the most 
marvellous recoveries in the history of war, was 
sure of its superiority, individual and collective, 
over the enemy. The grim, determined, stolid 
endurance of the spring had been changed by the 
series of victories which began with the battle of 
Amiens into eager, irresistible enthusiasm. The 
second battle of the Marne had taught the Allied 
leaders that the untried American troops could fight 
and win with far less training than they had calcu- 
lated to be necessary ; the victory of St. Mihiel had 
shown that an American army could take the field as 
an entity. Every one of the data upon which Luden- 
dorfif had based the plan for the Friedensturm had 
been proved to be false. The spirit of France was 
as high as ever ; the British army, far from being 
exhausted, had struck hard and often and with con- 
spicuous success ; the Americans were not only 
present in numbers, but had taught the Germans to 
fear their dash, skill and valour. 



124 



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Sissor 



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CHAPTER IV 

ARMAGEDDON 

The Hindenburg Line — The American Battle of the 
Meuse-Argonne — Gouraud in Champagne — Haig 
Breaks the Hindenburg Line — Kingnf^lberf s Advance 
into Belgium — The Result of Armtgeddon 

FocH, having prepared the way for his decisive thrust 
by his series of preliminary punches, was about to 
launch the Allied armies against the most formidable 
of all the German defenses. The name "Hinden- 
burg Line" originated with the British soldiers, who 
so entitled the great system of German works which 
had been discovered towards the end of 1916 behind 
the Somme battlefield. 

At the end of August, 1916, when Hindenburg 
and Ludendorff first arrived at Great Headquarters 
the German military situation was by no means 
rosy. Russia was still formidable, the Austrian 
army required a great deal of support, Roumania 
was about to enter the field, the Verdun offensive 
had proved to be a disastrous failure, the British 
army had grown to formidable dimensions, and 
the Franco-British attacks on the Somme were 
pressing the Germans hard and eating up their 

125 



The Last Four Months 



reserves. Ludendorff wished first to finish off Russia 
and Roumania, and in order to do this he had to 
make the situation in the West safe and to be able 
to economise troops there. The only way in which 
he could do this effectively was by shortening his 
front. He could not give up any ground in Belgium 
without endangering his hold upon Ostend and 
Zeebrugge, which were invaluable as bases from 
which submarines and destroyers could attack the 
British communications across the Channel, while 
the country about Bruges and Ghent gave him an 
excellent jumping-off place for aeroplane raids upon 
London and the southeast of England. He did not 
wish to abandon Lille, because great pains had been 
taken to fortify the place, which had become the 
northern pivot of the German defensive system, 
while the great manufacturing district surrounding 
the town was of the utmost value. Nor did he wish 
to come away from the Vimy Ridge, for it covered 
a great part of the Lens coal fields, and in the hands 
of the Allies would be a strong barrier against a 
German offensive when he was ready to attack in 
the West. West of Laon the St. Gobain massif 
formed a pivot for his centre, which it was important 
to hold. Between Reims and Verdun a withdrawal 
would not shorten his front, and would bring his 
enemy dangerously near the railway which connected 
Metz with Sedan and Mezieres, part of his main 
lateral line of communications. In the east he could 
not give ground without exposing Metz to bombard- 



Armageddon 



ment and Alsace and Lorraine to invasion. Between 
the Vimy Ridge and the St. Gobain massif, however, 
his front formed a great arc, into which the French 
and British had bitten deep during the battle of the 
Somme. By coming out of this arc he would shorten 
his front, get his troops out of an embarrassing 
position, and would be yielding French territory 
which was of no special value to him. Accordingly 
he determined to construct a chord for the arc, and 
to draw back to the chord in his own time. So 
the Hindenburg line was begun. 

The original section of the Hindenburg line 
started just east of Arras, where it connected with 
the defenses of the Vimy Ridge and ran southeast- 
wards to the Canal du Nord, eight miles west of 
Cambrai; thence it followed an almost north and 
south line past the western outskirts of St. Quentin, 
through La Fere, to the St. Gobain massif. It was 
this portion of the line which leaped into fame when 
Ludendorjff carried out his withdrawal in the early 
months of 1917. He had realised that he would 
be attacked again on the Western Front in the 
spring of that year, and that his armies between 
the Oise and the Scarpe were as the result of the 
battle of the Somme in no condition to meet attack. 
He tells us that there was no alternative to with- 
drawal.^ Having completed his defenses, he slowly 
brought back the bulk of his troops and material, 
leaving only rearguards in his front line. He 

iLudendorff, p. 322. 



The Last Four Months 



then proceeded to lay waste systematically the 
country he intended to abandon. Every article 
of value was removed from the French towns 
and villages, all the able-bodied inhabitants were 
deported, and most of those who were too 
young, too old or too feeble to be of service were 
collected in two or three centres to be rescued by 
the Allies when they advanced. The trees were cut 
down, not even the orchards being spared, the 
villages were set on fire, the towns were gutted, 
explosives being used for the more solid buildings 
which fire could not damage sufficiently, the wells 
were fouled, every road and railway bridge was 
destroyed, the railway embankments were blown in, 
the rails were torn up, and mines were exploded 
under every cross-roads, making craters which effec- 
tively barred wheeled traffic. As a last refinement a 
series of devilishly cunning booby traps was devised, 
consisting of wires connected to German helmets, 
pianos, door-handles, the steps of dug-outs or of 
houses, which when touched exploded charges and 
cost us the lives of many of our men. The systematic 
and skilful savagery of the modern German created 
a devastation which shamed the best efforts of his 
untutored forbears. This was all part of Luden- 
dorff's scheme of defense. He knew that the time 
and labour required to restore the communications, 
to repair the bridges, and provide water and shelter 
for their troops would derange the plans of the 
Allied generals, and as a purely military measure the 

128 



Armageddon 



scheme was an unqualified success. Nivelle had 
intended that one of his attacks should be made 
against the southern part of the front from which 
the Germans had retired, and he had no time to 
prepare properly for another to take its place, with 
the result that his attempt on St. Quentin was 
repulsed, while Ludendorff, by shortening his front, 
obtained the reserves necessary to meet and check 
the main French attack on the Aisne. Only the 
British part of Nivelle's campaign met with any 
considerable measure of success, and in the battle of 
Arras a part of the Arras arm of the Hindenburg 
line was rolled up. 

Before the battle of Arras started the Germans 
had begun to prepare for the possibility of the 
capture of the Vimy Ridge by digging a northern 
extension of the Hindenburg line, which ran from 
Queant, ten miles west of Cambrai, and then north- 
wards through Drocourt and east of Lens to the 
southern defenses of Lille. This was the line known 
to the British army as "the Drocourt-Queant 
switch", and broken by them on September 2, 1918. 
It was the beginning of a vast extension of the 
Hindenburg system carried out throughout 1917, 
during the whole of which year the Germans were 
on the defensive. Lille and Metz became the main 
pivots of this extended system. The term "line" 
as applied to it is a misnomer, for nowhere did it 
consist of a single line of trenches. It was composed 
of a whole series of trench lines enclosing a heavily 

129 



The Last Four Months 



fortified area many miles in depth. The Germans, 
to mark their sense of its importance, named its 
various sections after the heroes of German 
mythology. The Drocourt switch they called the 
"Wotan position"; the section covering Cambrai 
and St. Quentin, the "Siegfried position"; that 
south of St. Quentin and west of Laon, the 
"Alberich position"; behind the Champagne front 
came the "Brunehilde position" ; and the southern- 
most positions, which ran east of the Argonne to the 
Meuse and thence to Metz, were called the "Ej-iem- 
hilde and Michel positions." Thus a great barrier 
was built up from north to south covering Douai, 
Cambrai and St. Quentin and protecting the railway 
connecting Metz with Sedan and Mezieres. Of the 
various sections of this barrier, the Siegfried sys- 
tem in front of Cambrai and St. Quentin, which 
was begun first, was the most elaborate; the 
Kriemhilde section had not the same depth, partly 
because the ground on the Meuse-Argonne front 
was naturally very defensible, and the approaches 
to the Kriemhilde line were more difficult than 
those leading to other sections, and partly be- 
cause the original German trenches between the 
Meuse and the Argonne were never penetrated by 
Allied troops from the first days of trench warfare 
until they were stormed by the First American Army 
on September 26, 1918. 

The principles on which these lines were 
elaborated were worked out by the Germans as the 

130 



Armageddon 



result of a close study of their experiences in the 
first battle of the Somme. If that battle cost us 
dear, it and the battle of Verdun destroyed the 
flower of the German army, and it became evident 
to the German leaders that a few more such struggles 
would exhaust their military strength. By the 
summer of 1916 the work of Mr. Lloyd George at 
the British Ministry of Munitions and of M. Albert 
Thomas at the French Ministry had begun to take 
effect. For the first time in the war the Allies on 
the Western Front were superior to the Germans in 
gunpowder and in the number of shells at the service 
of the guns. The bombardment preliminary to the 
infantry attack by the British in the Somme battle 
lasted seven days, and was heard in the suburbs of 
London, one hundred fifty miles away. The Ger- 
mans realised that at this period of the war bom- 
bardment had become the principal means of attack 
by the Allies, and that their strongest trenches 
would crumble to pieces if exposed to the full blast 
of the tornado of shell which could be hurled against 
them. Until " sound ranging " was highly developed, 
which did not take place till later, the accuracy 
of the fire of artillery depended upon observation. 
The guns required eyes, particularly the medium 
and heavy guns, which fire from a long distance 
behind the front hues. Even the best observation 
from aeroplanes will not replace in a great artillery 
attack the eyes of an observer on the ground 
connected by telephone with the guns. The Ger- 

131 



The Last Four Months 



mans therefore designed the Hindenbiirg lines 
so that observation of them from the ground should 
be as difl&cult as possible. Whenever it could be 
done, they were constructed along the back slopes 
of ridges, not along the top or on the front slopes, 
where they would be easily seen. In order to keep 
the observers and the guns at a distance, and to 
disorganise the attacking infantry, strong outpost 
positions were built often as much as three or four 
miles in front of the main positions. The troops in 
these outpost positions were intended to fall back 
before a heavy attack, after delaying it as much as 
possible by machine-gun and rifle fire, and with this 
method of defense it would not be necessary to keep 
large numbers of troops in the very front lines, which 
would be exposed to the worst of the bombardment. 
This was, in fact, an early version of the system of 
defense which Gouraud applied so brilliantly when 
he defeated the great German attack of July 15, 
1918.1 

In the Siegfried section the system was given 
great depth, so that if the attackers succeeded in 
storming the first lines it would be necessary for 
them to pause until the guns had been brought for- 
ward and the stocks of shell brought up for a renewed 

^ This was the system of defense when strong lines were in existence 
as battle positions. When the battle positions were pierced, it was 
usually necessary to dispute' every yard of ground. The outpost sys- 
tem was abandoned by the Germans in the late stages of the third battle 
of Ypres and in September, 1918, and by us on the front of the Fifth 
Army after the German attack on March 31 . 

132 



Armageddon 



bombardment of the rear lines. Between Cambrai 
and St. Quentin the Siegfried system, from the out- 
post positions near Epehy to the rearmost Hne near 
Beaurevoir, was as much as ten miles deep. The 
most elaborate wire entanglements were provided in 
front of each line of trenches. They were often 
arranged in geometrical patterns, so that the angles 
could be swept by machine-gun fire, and there were, 
in plans, as many as eight or nine belts of barbed wire 
in front of the trenches. Standing, after the great 
battle had been won and the Siegfried system had 
been pierced, on the ridges east of the St. Quentin 
Canal, in the heart of the system, one looked over 
miles of dense entanglements running in every 
direction, and was filled with amazement that it 
should have been possible for flesh and blood to storm 
a way through such obstacles. Heavily concreted 
shelters for the infantry and machine-gunners were 
provided in the fire trenches, while farther back 
great underground barracks were constructed at a 
depth to make them proof against the heaviest 
bombardment. 

When we first broke into the Hindenburg line 
with Byng's tank attack of November, 1917, we 
found that the Germans had hollowed out the 
ground under many of the villages, piling the chalk 
into the buildings so that it would not attract 
attention and would add to the immunity of the dug- 
out from bombardment. These dug-outs were fitted 
up on a lavish scale so as to provide for the 

133 



The Last Four Months 



comfort of the occupants. They were often boarded 
in and fitted with electric Hght, while water and 
sleeping bunks were provided and they were fur- 
nished with numerous stairways, so that the men in 
them could come out quickly when the bombard- 
ment was over. Through the middle of the Siegfried 
system ran two canals, the Canal du Nord and the 
St. Quentin Canal, which near Cambrai becomes 
the navigable Scheldt. Both of these canals, which 
run in places through deep cuttings, were used by the 
enemy, who dug deep into the banks to provide 
shelter for his men. Between Bellicourt and Vend- 
huile the St. Quentin Canal ran underground for a 
distance of six thousand yards, and this tunnel, 
when blocked up, provided the Germans with a 
ready-made underground barrack, which was fitted 
out for occupation, and connected by numerous 
shafts with the trenches above. Along the top of 
the canal, which constituted a very serious natural 
obstacle, numbers of concreted machine-gun em- 
placements were built, so that the whole length of 
the canal when it ran above ground could be swept 
by cross fire. 

Such were the defenses upon which the Germans, 
not without justification, pinned their faith. In 
keeping with the names bestowed upon them, le- 
gends had grown up in Germany as to their extent 
and strength, and they had therefore acquired 
great political as well as military importance. 
While they were intact the German people felt that 

134 



Armageddon 



loss of territory or reverses in the field were not 
matters of great concern, for at the worst there lay 
behind these bastions rich provinces of France and 
the greater part of Belgium, which could be ex- 
changed for favourable terms of peace. The Ger- 
man leaders could still tell us to look at the map. 
When they were broken, the effect both upon leaders 
and upon the people was as overwhelming as it was 
unexpected. 

The Allied defenses have often been contrasted 
unfavourably with these elaborate and intricate 
German trench systems, but the conditions on the 
two sides were very different. In the first place, 
from the beginning of 1915 until the end of 1917 
the Allies were, with the exceptions of the German 
gas attack at Ypres and the battle of Verdun, almost 
always attacking, devoting all their energies to the 
attempt to break through the trench barrier, and 
the vast preparations required for the battles which 
were fought during that period left little labour 
over for the elaboration of defenses. In the second 
place, the Germans were much more favourably 
placed than the Allies as regards labour. They had 
Russian prisoners of war in great numbers, and the 
fact that the Hague Convention forbade the em- 
ployment of prisoners of war upon military work 
counted as nothing with them. They were also 
able to employ forced labour from the populations 
of Belgium and the occupied districts of Northern 
France, and with these two sources of supply they 

135 



The Last Four Months 



could carry out the most extensive works without 
calling upon the army for more men than were 
necessary for planning and supervision. The con- 
struction of these great defensive systems therefore 
did not involve the withdrawal of any soldiers from 
the fighting front, and did not interfere with the 
rest and training of the troops in war. The Allies, 
on the other hand, could only provide labour for 
the construction of rear lines of defense at the ex- 
pense of their armies, or of the factories in the 
homeland which provided for the great and ever- 
growing demands of the armies and fleets, and had 
to meet the urgent call for more and more ships. 

It is quite true that in the first years of the war 
the German infantryman dug better and worked 
harder at his trenches than did the British infantry- 
man or his French comrade, but this industry would 
not have sufficed for the construction of the Hinden- 
burg system, and as time went on and the quality 
and discipline of the German troops declined, the 
new German trenches, on ground won in attack, 
which had necessarily to be constructed by the 
soldiers, grew less and less formidable. Mangin, in 
his attack of July 18 in the second battle of the 
Marne, found little behind the enemy's front line, 
and Rawlinson had the same experience in the battle 
of Amiens of August 8. Time and labour made the 
Hindenburg systems possible. 

Those systems had, as I have said, been designed 
to meet a great bombardment, but by the time 

136 



Armageddon 



Foch was ready to assault them the conditions had 
altered fundamentally. Bombardment had ceased 
to be the only or even the chief means at the service 
of the Allies for opening the road for the infan- 
try attack. The perfected tank was able to break 
through any belts of barbed wire, however dense, 
and force its way across any trenches, given reason- 
ably favourable conditions of ground. I do not 
maintain that tanks alone would have enabled us 
to break through the Siegfried system, for the two 
canals formed an obstacle which the tanks could 
not cross, and the gaps in and between the canals 
were not sufficiently wide to allow of a really effec- 
tive breach being made where they occurred. In the 
battle of Amiens the lessons of Hamel had been 
applied on a great scale, and with complete success. 
The triumph of the tanks in that battle had been 
greatly due to the suddenness and to the power 
of the bombardment which fell upon the German 
artillery. Both methods of attack had to be com- 
bined, and were combined with rare skill. But it 
is certain that neither Foch's skilful preparation 
for the great battle, nor the valour of the infantry, 
would have brought us victory if we had had to 
rely upon bombardment alone in order to batter 
down the German defenses. 

The acres of wire entanglement which surrounded 
the trenches of the Siegfried system would not have 
been cut without that prolonged artillery prepara- 
tion which had failed in the past to solve the problem 

137 



The Last Four Months 



of attack in trench warfare. With the warning 
which this preparation would have given them the 
Germans would have been able to shelter their 
machine-guns and infantry in the vast dug-outs 
which they had prepared, and have brought them 
out after the barrage had gone forward. Even 
when we had tanks they sometimes succeeded in 
doing this, as the Americans fighting with us on 
September 29 fomid to their cost. The tanks were 
needed not only to clear a way for the infantry 
through the wire but to crush the enemy's machine- 
gun nests and keep his men in their underground 
shelters. Failing this the exhaustion of the enemy's 
reserves would not have sufficed to give us victory 
in the great battle, for the German troops holding 
the line would have been able to break up our 
attacks without support from behind. The tanks 
had proved their efficacy in the preparation for 
Armageddon; now they were to take their part 
in the culmination towards which Foch had been 
working, and few things helped us more in the 
decisive struggle than the moral ascendancy which 
the success of the tanks in the preliminary battles 
had given us over the Germans. 

Captured German orders and other documents 
bear testimony to the dread with which the enemy 
regarded tanks at this time. Ludendorff had com- 
pletely changed his views regarding them, and in 
a circular dealing with the methods of meeting tank 
attack, he wrote: "Our earlier successes against 

138 



Armageddon 



tanks led to a certain contempt for this weapon of 
warfare. We must now reckon with more dangerous 
tanks." A German army order issued after the 
battle of Amiens said: "The enemy now relies 
chiefly upon tanks for the success of his attacks. 
This weapon can only be overcome by the strictest 
attention to the prescribed counter-measures. I 
hold all commanders down to company-commanders 
personally responsible that there is no relaxation 
at any time in their counter-measures. Specially 
selected lookout men are to be always in position 
day and night to give warning of the approach of 
tanks. Messages regarding the attack by tanks 
are to be given absolute priority, and are to be sent 
immediately to the artillery which is specially 
detailed to fire upon tanks. All infantry officers 
must know the exact position of this artillery in 
their section. An officer is to be appointed in each 
trench to have charge of the light signals for giving 
warning in case of tank attack." This is the type 
of order which is the refuge of authority when 
caught napping. The German leaders had delayed 
too long to study the possibilities of tanks and the 
most effective means of meeting them. The "coun- 
ter-measures" presented in this order might have 
availed against tanks alone; they were useless 
against tanks, artillery and infantry working in 
combination. They were, in fact, worse than use- 
less, they were harmful, for they served to demon- 
strate to the German soldier, who was already in 

139 



The Last Four Months 



mortal fear of tanks and prepared to make their 
appearance an excuse for sm-render, that his chiefs 
were as frightened of them as he was, and that they 
had no effective reply ready. 

There are few things more depressing to the men 
in the ranks, or more calculated to shake their 
confidence in their leaders, than the knowledge 
that the enemy possesses a powerful weapon with 
which they are not provided. We had bitter ex- 
perience of this in the winter of 1914-1915, when 
we had to hold the line without the aid of trench 
mortars, with a totally inadequate supply of hand 
grenades, and with little support from heavy ar- 
tillery, with all of which the Germans were well 
provided. They had no more expected or desired 
the deadlock of trench warfare than we had, but 
they had prepared for the siege of fortresses, and 
had the appliances for siege warfare ready, and we 
had not. Our men then bore the strain of meeting 
superior equipment with superhuman endurance, 
and in 1918 the German troops failed to stand a 
like test. Their own tanks were few in number and 
of inferior design, and their knowledge of our su- 
periority in that weapon had shaken their confidence 
in the defenses before they were attacked. Sooner 
or later in war an antidote is found to every device 
of attack or of defense, and the combination of 
gun and tank proved to be the antidote to the 
Hindenburg line, while the Germans were not 
allowed the time to find an antidote to the tank. 

140 



Armageddon 



The anti-tank gun, on which they had relied after 
their first experience of the effect of artillery fire 
upon tanks, had been successfully countered by 
our barrage. They then invented an anti-tank 
rifle firing a heavy armour-piercing bullet, but it 
had not quick success, and towards the end they 
were producing an anti-tank machine-gun which 
might have been more successful but was in the 
field too late to receive a fair trial. It would be 
idle to suppose that no reply to the tank would have 
been forthcoming had the war gone on longer; all 
that is certain is that British ingenuity found the 
answer to the problem presented by German field 
fortification before German ingenuity discovered 
how to overcome the tank. 

The general plan for the great battle which was 
to decide the issue of the war was determined by 
Foch in consultation with the Allied Commanders- 
in-chief before Pershing won the victory of St. 
Mihiel. That victory served to confirm the Gen- 
eralissimo in his intentions. As the result of the 
second battle of the Marne, and of the retreat of 
the Germans into the Hindenburg line before the 
British blows, the German front ran roughly from 
north to south from the North Sea coast near 
Nieuport, just east of Ypres, by Armentieres, west 
of Douai, Cambrai and St. Quentin to the River 
Oise near La Fere. Starting from the Oise it made 
a big bulge westwards round the St. Gobain Forest 
along the Oise and the Vesle to Reims, where it 

141 



The Lad Four Months 



again straightened out and ran eastwards through 
the Champagne heathlands across the Argonne 
Forest to the Meuse, northeast of Verdun. Be- 
hind this front at a distance of about forty-five 
miles from the British Knes opposite Cambrai, and 
of about twenty miles from the Meuse-Argonne 
front, ran the main line of railway connecting 
Metz, Sedan, Mezieres, Maubeuge, Mons and Brus- 
sels. This railway line formed the spinal chord 
of the German defensive system, was Ludendorff's 
main means of moving his reserves and military 
stores rapidly from flank to flank, and was his 
last good line of lateral communication west of the 
Ardennes. 

Foch proposed to strike at this spinal chord from 
either side of the great bulge in the enemy's line.^ 
The First American Army was to advance between 
the Meuse and the Argonne upon Sedan, while 
Gouraud drove in between the Argonne and Reims 
towards Mezieres. This constituted the right wing 
of the Allied battle front. The intention was that 
Gouraud and the Americans should pinch out the 
Argonne Forest by advancing on either side of it, 
for the French had learned by bitter experience 
what a terrible obstacle the forest presented when 
defended by the skilled and determined German 
machine-gunners, who, in a country where it was 
almost impossible to get at them with tanks or with 
artillery, were in their element. Actually this 

^Tbe direction of these various attaclis is shown on Map Number I. 

14^ 



Armageddon 



intention was not realised, and the prolonged stub- 
born fighting of the American troops through the 
forest has concentrated attention in the United 
States upon the struggle in the forest, to such an 
extent that the battle has come to be popularly 
known as the battle of the Argonne, but the main 
American forces were always to the east of the 
Argonne, and the axis of Pershing's attack ran 
through Montfaucon to Sedan. 

The attack to the north of the bulge was to be 
made by the first French Army and the First, 
Third and Fourth British Armies between the 
Scarpe and the Oise, and was to be directed through 
St. Quentin and Cambrai towards Maubeuge. It 
was known that Ludendorff, in his anxiety to pro- 
tect Cambrai and to secure his precious Hindenburg 
line, had been weakening his forces in Flanders, 
and Foch proposed to take advantage of this by 
making a third attack into Belgium with the Belgian 
army, reinforced by a portion of Degoutte's army, 
which had been sent northwards from the Aisne, 
and the Second British Army. This attack, if 
successful, would clear the Belgian coast and threaten 
the enemy's communication with Germany north 
of the Ardennes. Foch believed that the two main 
attacks on either side of the bulge would force the 
Germans to withdraw from it, and the French armies 
around the bulge were, while the three attacks were 
in progress, to keep the enemy in the bulge occupied, 
and prevent them from retiring at their leisure. 

143 



The Last Four Months 



The Fifth British Army, which had been recon- 
stituted under the command of General Birdwood, 
was to carry out a similar role on the Lille front 
between the main British attack on Cambrai and 
the Flanders attack. 

Such was the plan, — vast, simple and bold. Now 
that all is over, and that the plan has been brilliantly 
and completely successful, the courage and deter- 
mination of the men who formed it and carried it 
through is apt to be overlooked, more especially as 
the continuous and rapid succession of victories 
which began with the famous counter-stroke of 
July 18, produced in the public mind an exaggerated 
impression of weakness and even of collapse in the 
enemy. It seemed as if Foch had brought back the 
trumpets of Joshua, and that German defenses fell 
before him wherever and whenever he chose to 
advance. Yet in the third week of September the 
German resistance was far from broken. If the 
enemy's infantry had lost much of the dash and 
initiative which distinguished it in 1916, and the 
subordinate leaders had not the skill of their pre- 
decessors who had fallen in battle, his artillery, 
though weakening, was still powerful and well 
directed, and his machine-guns were manned by 
picked men of high courage, and had, from long 
experience, become more formidable than ever. 
The strongest of the German trench lines still lay 
in front of the Allies, lines which the enemy believed 
to be impregnable. ]\Iany of the American divisions 

144 



Armageddon 



which were to take part in the battle had had little 
or no war experience, and the last stages of their 
training had been hurried through. The American 
commanders and staffs had had no opportunity of 
handling such masses of troops as were to be em- 
ployed, and though St. Mihiel had proved to be one 
of the neatest and completest successes of the war, 
it had disclosed defects in the American organisation 
and staff. It was thought, particularly in the 
British War Cabinet, that it would be wiser to defer 
forcing a decision until the American troops had 
learned more and the American army had increased 
in size; that the attempt to break through should 
be postponed until the spring of 1919. 

Those who held this view were not without hope 
that the anticipations which they had long cherished 
would be realised, and that Germany would collapse 
when her props were knocked away. One of these 
props, Bulgaria, was on the point of surrender, and 
the news both from Austria and from Turkey was 
encouraging. It might never be necessary to assault 
the impenetrable barrier in the West. 

Though Foch was in supreme control, his special 
function was to coordinate the strategy of the 
Allied armies, and the Commanders-in-chief of 
those armies remained responsible to their Govern- 
ments for the lives and well-being of their men. It 
was a question of fighting a battle on a scale which 
had never yet been attempted, a battle in which 
millions of soldiers would take part, and hundreds 

145 



The Last Four Months 



of thousands of lives were at stake. Had Haig 
and Pershing hesitated, and the arguments in favour 
of hesitation were many, the great plan could not 
have been consummated. Haig was, however, 
confident in himself and in his men. Believing 
absolutely in their superiority over the Germans, 
and that no defenses could hold them back, he was 
ready to take on his shoulders the heavy responsi- 
bility of deciding to push on at once. 

The British Government, while unwilling to veto 
the plan, felt so doubtful of its success that they 
were not prepared to support it. Mr. Lloyd George, 
in daily contact with our difficulties in raising men 
for the prosecution of the war, in all its various 
aspects, dreaded the casualty lists of another Somme 
or Passchendaele, and his sympathies with the 
theory of victory by the way round were this time 
more powerful than his courage and readiness to 
take risks. Even Foch felt that he could not take 
the responsibility of ordering the army of another 
nation to advance against the serried lines of the 
Siegfried system. So Haig was left to bear the 
burden alone. He tells us in his despatch of Jan- 
uary 7, 1919, how he took it up. After describing 
the broad lines of Foch's plans and of the attacks 
to be carried out by the Allied armies, he goes on : 
"The results to be obtained from these different 
attacks depended in a peculiarly large degree upon 
the British attack in the centre. It was here that 
the enemy's defenses were most highly organised. 

146 



Armageddon 



If these were broken, the threat directed at his 
vital systems of lateral communication would of 
necessity react upon his defense elsewhere. 

"On the other hand, the long period of sustained 
offensive action through which the British armies 
had already passed had made large demands both 
upon the troops themselves and upon my available 
reserves. Throughout our attacks from August 8 
onwards, our losses in proportion to the results 
achieved and the number of prisoners taken had 
been consistently and remarkably small. In the 
aggregate, however, they were considerable, and 
in the face of them an attack upon so formidably 
organised a position as that which now confronted 
us could not be lightly undertaken. Moreover, 
the political effects of an unsuccessful attack upon 
a position so well known as the Hindenburg line 
would be large, and would go far to revive the 
declining morale not only of the German army but 
of the German people. 

"These different conditions were present to my 
mind. The probable results of a costly failure, or, 
indeed, of anything short of a decided success, in any 
attempt upon the main defenses of the Hindenburg 
line were obvious; but I was convinced that the 
British attack was the essential part of the general 
scheme, and that the moment was favourable. 

"Accordingly I decided to proceed with the 
attack, and all preparatory measures, including the 
preliminary operations already recounted, were 

147 



The Last Four Months 



carried out as rapidly and as thoroughly as 
possible." ^ 

In making this decision Haig staked his future ; 
not that such a consideration weighed with him for 
a moment ; but he must have known that failure, 
with a doubting Government behind him, could 
have for him but one result. At the time the fact 
that the War Cabinet sent no congratulations to 
the army on the victories of Bapaume, of the battle 
of the Scarpe, of Epehy, or of Cambrai, victories 
which gave us nearly 100,000 prisoners, caused 
much comment. The reason of this neglect was that 
the War Cabinet to the last doubted of victory 
and did not wish to appear to exult until all danger 
of a setback was over. So not until Foch assured 
Mr. Lloyd George on October 7 that Haig's hammer 
blows had done their work was any message sent. 

Pershing was equally sure that the proved valour, 
the vigour and enterprise of the American soldier 
would more than compensate for any lack of ex- 
perience and training. These were fateful decisions, 
for if we had not attacked, the war could not have 
been ended before the spring of 1919. The firm- 
ness and courage of these two men gave us complete 
victory in 1918. 

The victory of Bapaume, and the piercing of the 
Drocourt line in the battle of the Scarpe, had forced 
the enemy on the front covering Cambrai to take 
refuge behind the Canal du Nord, but southwest 

^Supplement to the London Gazette of January, 1919, par. 32, p. ^14. 

148 



Armageddon 



of Cambrai, and west of St. Quentin as far as the 
Oise, he still held strong advanced positions some 
three miles in front of the main Hindenburg sys- 
tem. 

These positions included the outpost defenses of 
that system and some of the British works which 
had been prepared to meet the March attack. It 
was necessary, therefore, before the Hindenburg 
line could be attacked, to clear the Germans out of 
these works, and this Haig did between September 
12 and 18, while Pershing was busy at St. Mihiel. 
During this period fifteen divisions of the British 
Third and Fourth Armies fought the battle of 
Epehy, and drove twenty German divisions back 
into the main Hindenburg line, capturing 11,750 
prisoners and 100 guns. Simultaneously Debeney's 
First French Army performed the same function 
between St. Quentin and La Fere. 

While these events were taking place on the 
Cambrai-St. Quentin front Pershing was quietly 
transferring troops from the St. Mihiel salient to 
Verdun. This movement had begun as soon as it 
was seen that the American divisions in the front 
line would succeed in the task of obliterating the 
salient, and that the reserve divisions would not be 
needed. It was carried through with the utmost 
secrecy, the American troops on the new front created 
by the battle of St. Mihiel doing everything that 
was possible to produce the impression that the 
advance would be continued towards Metz and 

149 



The Last Four Months 



Briey. Between the Meuse and the western edge 
of the Argonne, which had been inactive for more 
than a year, French troops continued to hold the 
trenches while the First American Army assembled 
behind them, and they were not relieved until the 
night of September 25-26. There is little doubt 
that the Germans were surprised when the great 
battle opened with an American attack between 
the Meuse and the Argonne, for they had not rein- 
forced their front, which was held by four divisions, 
who were overwhelmed by the nine American 
divisions which advanced against them. By the 
evening of the twenty-seventh the Americans had 
taken the first line defenses on the whole front of 
their attack, and in the centre had pressed forward 
to a depth of some seven miles, to the southern slopes 
of Montfaucon. This hill dominates the surrounding 
country, and for that reason the Crown Prince 
William had had built for himself on it a palatial 
dug-out from which he directed the operations in 
his unsuccessful attempt to capture Verdun. A 
gallant attempt to storm the hill and village on its 
summit made with the aid of tanks in the evening 
failed, but both were carried in a second attack the 
next day. By the evening of September 29 the 
Americans were in possession of the first and second 
German systems of defense between the Meuse and 
the Argonne, and had in places penetrated the third 
system. Ten thousand prisoners fell to Pershing 
in this first advance. 

150 



Armageddon 



Ludendorff now became suddenly aware that he 
was menaced by a deadly blow at his lateral com- 
munications. He could write of St. Mihiel as a 
regrettable incident; he was, in fact, preparing to 
come out of the salient when he was attacked. The 
majority of the troops defending it had been of 
inferior quality, and the Germans could always 
throw the blame for their failure upon the Austrians 
who fought with them. But the capture of Mont- 
f aucon was quite a different matter. The Americans 
were on territory which had not been trodden by 
Allied troops since the early days of 1914, having 
broken through defenses which had been prepared 
and held by the Germans since the first days of 
trench warfare, trenches established on ground as 
difficult to attack as that on any part of the whole 
long front. There was no question of yielding 
voluntarily a foot of that ground, which was especially 
precious to the Germans as their lines through it 
ran nearer than elsewhere to the Metz-Maubeuge 
railway. The American advance, therefore, con- 
fronted Ludendorff with a crisis which had to be 
dealt with at any cost. 

While the battle had opened thus auspiciously on 
the Verdun front, Gouraud had attacked simultane- 
ously in Champagne on a front of eighteen miles 
from the west of the Argonne toward Reims. The 
Champagne hills had been the scene of Joffre's 
first efforts to wear down the enemy by the "nib- 
bling" process, and of his attempt to force a way 

151 



The Last Four Months 



through the trench barrier in one great rush in 
September, 1915. The left of Gouraud's battle- 
front included part of the ground on which he had 
defeated the German attack of July 15, when bom- 
bardment and counter-bombardment had torn the 
surface of the heathlands and left an area of desola- 
tion and destruction, which, if less deep than that 
of the Somme battlefields, could only be compared 
in its intensity with that on the Ypres front. For- 
ward movement across country so pitted with mine 
craters and shell-holes was very laborious, and the 
Germans held all the heights commanding the lines 
of the French advance. Gouraud's progress on 
the first day was therefore slower than Pershing's, 
and by the evening of the twenty-seventh his in- 
fantry had only got forward some three miles. It 
took him three days of hard fighting to force his 
way clear of the old battlefields, but by September 
30 he had won through, and thenceforward his diffi- 
culties diminished just when those of Pershing 
began to increase. On October 1 he was on the 
outskirts of Challerange, some nine miles from 
his starting point, having captured 13,000 prisoners 
and more than 300 guns, and having made Luden- 
dorjff realise that he constituted a danger not less 
imminent than that of the American advance. 
There for the present I must leave the right wing of 
Foch's battle to turn to the British front. 

The British attacks were timed to begin in the 
early morning of September 27, and on the evening 

152 



Armageddon 



before a great bombardment opened on a thirty-mile 
front, from a point about two miles northwest of St. 
Quentin, as far as the Sensee River northwest of 
Cambrai. Then in the grey light of early dawn the 
4th, 6th, 17th and Canadian Corps, thirteen divi- 
sions in all, of Byng's Third Army and Home's 
First Army advanced on the Cambrai front, stormed 
the immensely strong Canal du Nord, swept be- 
yond Bourlon Wood and Fontaine-Notre-Dame, the 
extreme limits of our advance in the first battle of 
Cambrai of November, 1917, and captured Sailly, 
more than six miles from their starting point, taking 
over 10,000 prisoners and 200 guns. By this blow 
Cambrai was threatened from the north, whereas 
in the previous battle we had attempted to approach 
the town from the southeast, where the St. Quentin 
Canal was a formidable obstacle to our troops, and 
we had in one bound got sufficiently near to the 
railway lines, which converged on Cambrai and 
made of it one of the most important junctions in 
the hands of the Germans, to be able to deny their 
use to the enemy. 

I have already mentioned that Ludendorff, in 
his anxiety to protect Cambrai, had been with- 
drawing troops from Flanders. Doubtless he re- 
membered our experiences in the third battle of 
Ypres, and recalled the fact that the Flanders mud 
had there done more to check our progress than 
had the German troops. The season was already 
far advanced and there had been a good deal of 

153 



The Last Four Months 



rain. The state of his reserves was such that in 
order to meet the American advance west of the 
Meuse, and the British advance on Cambrai, both 
of them blows aimed at his vitals, he had to take 
chances somewhere, and he decided to take them 
on the Flanders front. He left less than five di- 
visions to hold the seventeen miles of front, from 
near Vormezeele, four and a half miles south of 
Ypres, to Dixmude, and on September 28 this thin 
line was attacked and overwhelmed by the Belgian 
army, supported by some French divisions, and by 
six divisions of Plumer's Second Army, the whole 
under the command of King Albert. The success 
won by the gallant Belgian king, who had seen his 
army cooped in for four years behind the floods of 
the Yser, and had only left it at rare intervals, 
living with his Queen in a little villa within range 
of the German guns and in a district incessantly 
attacked by the enemy's bombing aeroplanes, was 
startlingly complete and exceeded the wildest ex- 
pectations. The Flanders ridges, up which we had 
hewn our way at heavy cost in three and a half 
months of fighting in the autumn of 1917, were won 
in less than forty-eight hours. The French and 
Belgians, following up this success vigorously on 
the left of the battle, swept forward beyond Pass- 
chendaele, and by the evening of October 1 had 
penetrated almost to the outskirts of Roulers, 
while Plumer, throwing in three more divisions, 
drove across the Messines Ridge, cleared the Lys 

154 



Armageddon 



valley from Armentieres to Comines, and advanced 
to within two miles of Menin. Thus Lille, like 
Cambrai, was menaced from the north. 

While King Albert was putting the finishing 
touches to his victory the crisis of the great battle 
had been reached and passed. The bombardment 
which had begun on the evening of September 26 
on the front of the British Fourth, Third and First 
Armies, had been continued on the front of the 
Fourth Army throughout the twenty-seventh and 
twenty-eighth, while the other two armies were 
fighting their way towards Cambrai. During the 
final stage of that bombardment nearly one million 
shells, weighing some twenty-five thousand tons, 
were poured into the German lines. This wholesale 
expenditure of ammunition took place during about 
one-tenth of the period of the whole battle, and on 
considerably less than one-tenth of the fronts attacked. 

During the war of 1870-1871 the total number of 
rounds fired by the ^German artillery in the field 
amounted to 360,000, as compared with 4,362,500 
tons of shells fired by the British artillery alone 
on the Western Front, and yet, so tremendous had the 
effect of the German guns appeared to be in those 
days, that Napoleon III told his enemies after his 
surrender at Sedan that he felt himself beaten by 
their artillery. Science and industry have in less 
than fifty years developed man's power of destruc- 
tion to an extent which makes comparison with the 
past futile. 

155 



The Last Four Months 



With this artillery attack we reverted to former 
methods, and the reason for doing so was that im- 
mediately behind that part of the German front 
to be attacked by the Fourth Army ran the St. 
Quentin Canal, which merges near Cambrai in 
the navigable Scheldt, is capable of taking the 
largest barges and is unfordable. With such an 
obstacle in their path tanks could not be used to 
prepare the way for the infantry, except against 
such portions of the German line as lay west of 
the canal, and against the two stretches , where the 
canal ran underground, one of about four and a 
half miles between Bellicourt and Vendhuile, the 
other of about a thousand yards long just north of 
St. Quentin known as the Le Tronquoy Tunnel. 
So the guns came into their own. It was long 
since the Germans had been subjected to such a 
dose of shelling, and many of their troops having 
come from the Eastern Front, or being fresh drafts 
from Germany, had never experienced a really 
intense and prolonged bombardment. The moral 
effect of this cannonade was therefore very great. 
It drove the enemy into his deep dug-outs and 
tunnels, and prevented his carrying parties from 
bringing up food and ammunition to them. 

At 5.30 A.M. on September 29 Rawlinson's Fourth 
Army attacked the heart of the Hindenburg line 
on a front of twelve miles with the 9th and 3rd 
British Corps and the 2nd American Corps, with the 
Australian Corps in support behind it. Debeney's 

156 



Armageddon 



First French Army extended the battle front to the 
south and attacked St. Quentin, while two corps of 
the Third British Army prolonged it to the north as 
far as the loop in the St. Quentin Canal at Marcoing. 
This was the decisive day of the great battle and was 
marked by many glorious feats of arms. The 9th 
Corps attacked the St. Quentin Canal at and north 
of Bellenglise, the 46th Division, North Midland 
Territorials, leading, the men advancing equipped 
with life-belts, requisitioned from the Channel steam- 
boats, and carrying mats and rafts. Here and there 
they managed to cross by foot bridges, which the 
enemy had been unable to destroy, but the majority 
dropped down the sheer sides of the canal, swam 
across, clambered out and stormed the German 
trenches on the top of the eastern bank. Then 
swinging southward they surprised the enemy before 
he had realised the new direction of the attack, and 
on this one day the division captured over 4,000 
prisoners and 70 guns. 

The 2nd American Corps attacked the Bellicourt 
Tunnel front, which the Germans, knowing that it 
was exposed to tank attack, had fortified with 
especial care. The 30th American Division stormed 
through the intricate web of barbed wire and the 
network of trenches which surrounded Bellicourt, 
and breaking clean through this section of the main 
Hindenburg line, carried the village, only to be at- 
tacked in the rear by the German machine-gunners 
who had come out of their subterranean shelters 

X57 



The Last Four Months 



in the tunnel. The AustraHans coming up in sup- 
port had to tackle these pests without the aid of 
artillery or tanks, for both the barrage and the 
tanks had gone forward with the Americans, but 
they overcame them, and another breach in the 
Hindenburg line was effected. 

The 27th American Division, attacking on the left 
of the Thirtieth, had an especially difficult task, for 
the westerly bend in the canal at Vendhuile made it 
impossible for the British troops farther north to 
keep pace with the advance of the Twenty-seventh, 
and its left flank was exposed to cross-fire of artillery 
and machine-guns from the ridge northeast of Vend- 
huile on the eastern bank of the canal. Two regi- 
ments of the division, the 106th and 107th, had 
therefore to fight desperately hard to safeguard the 
left of the division, while the right and centre 
pushed on to the village of Bony. Later the British 
12th and 18th Divisions forced their way across 
the canal to the north of the tunnel, and relieved 
the pressure on the left flank of the 27th American 
Division which had beaten off repeated and fierce 
German counter-attacks. 

On September 30 and on the following days the 
yielding enemy was driven back on the whole front 
of the Fourth, Third and First Armies. On the 
right of the Fourth Army the 1st British Division 
had, by the thirtieth, gained possession of the 
Le Tronquoy Tunnel, and crossed the canal to the 
north of St. Quentin, a feat as splendid as that of 

158 



Armageddon 



the 46th Division on the previous day. Its im- 
mediate consequence was that the Germans retired 
from St. Quentin, which fell into the hands of 
the French on October 1. The Australians, pass- 
ing through the Americans, sent the right centre 
of our battle front forward to within touch of 
the last line of the Hindenburg system, which 
ran through Beaurevoir. The New Zealanders 
and the 3rd British Division crossed the canal 
to the south of Cambrai, while the Canadians all 
but encircled the town to the north. By October 
3 the Fourth Army had broken through the Beau- 
revoir line, and by the fifth the v/hole line of the 
canal, and the Hindenburg defenses along it, were 
in our hands. 

The victory was complete and decisive, and in 
winning it the three British armies had captured 
36,500 prisoners and 380 guns. Thirty British and 
two American divisions with a British cavalry di- 
vision had defeated thirty-nine German divisions, 
holding the strongest defenses ever devised by the 
wit of man. At last after four years of dogged 
effort the great trench barriers had been pierced, 
for between the British army and its objective, 
Maubeuge, there lay but one German line, which 
the enemy, believing the Hindenburg system to be 
proof against all assaults, had not troubled to com- 
plete. This line lay some fourteen miles back, 
and its artificial defenses consisted of nothing more 
formidable than a thin fence of barbed wire, with 

159 



The Last Four Months 



the sites of the trenches to be dug behind it marked 
out upon the ground. The victors of Cambrai 
looked out over rolling, wooded, and well-watered 
country with something of the joy and wonder 
which filled the soldiers of Xenophon when at the 
end of their great march they first saw the sea. 
The leafy trees, the harvested fields, the green 
meadow lands and the valleys were to an army 
which had lived and fought for four years sur- 
rounded by hideous devastation, with the stink of 
the blood-soaked, battle-torn ground ever in their 
nostrils, more convincing evidence of achievement 
than tens of thousands of prisoners and hundreds 
of guns. 

The effect of the three great blows on the Meuse- 
Champagne front, on the St. Quentin-Cambrai 
front, and in Flanders was, as Foch had hoped it 
would be, to cause the Germans to yield in the in- 
tervals between those attacks. By the end of Sep- 
tember the enemy had begun to withdraw between 
Lens and Armentieres before the left of our First 
Army and our Fifth Army, and there were signs 
of retirement from the St. Gobain bulge. He was 
at once pressed by the French and British forces 
on these fronts, and the battle thereupon enveloped 
the whole 250 miles from Dixmude to the Meuse. 
Foch's great conception had been realised; he had 
delivered his big kick and the whole German front 
was crumbling under it. For a time, on the British 
front at least, the German morale broke down, pris- 

160 



Armageddon 



oners were taken from the German infantry in 
great numbers and without much resistance, and 
there were signs of confusion and disorder in the 
enemy ranks, though the German artillery retained 
much of its efficiency an^d the machine-gunners 
continued to fight with their old devotion and 
skill. 

More important still, the resolution of the German 
High Command was badly shaken. There were no 
men in Germany to replace the tremendous losses in 
the field, and many of Ludendorff's divisions were 
reduced to mere skeletons. He had piled up behind 
his front, for his great offensive, enormous stocks of 
shell, and of military stores, and had had neither the 
time nor the transport to remove them. The Allies 
had captured thousands of guns. The output of the 
German munitions factories was quite incapable of 
making good these losses, and he had ample evidence 
that the Allied factories had not yet reached the 
zenith of their production. In September Haig had 
more guns, more machine-guns, more ammunition 
and more aeroplanes than he had ever possessed, 
while the growth of the American army was daily 
bringing more and more guns into line. 

With dwindling resources, Ludendorff saw him- 
self faced by three great dangers : in the east the 
Americans, more numerous and efficient than he had 
believed they could possibly be, were threatening his 
communications between Metz and Mezieres; in 
the centre the British army had beaten the best 

161 



The Last Four Months 



of his troops in their strongest defenses, and he had 
no more Hindenburg lines to stay its progress ; in 
Flanders the Belgians, whom he had classed as 
capable only of defense, had won their way into the 
open and were fighting with unexpected dash. 
Lastly, Bulgaria had collapsed, Mackensen was in 
dire straits and was clamouring for reinforcements 
to enable him to escape from the Balkans. Under 
the pressure of these calamities Ludendorff threw 
up the sponge on the evening of September 28. 
The next day he and Hindenburg met the Kaiser 
and the Foreign Secretary, who had come to Head- 
quarters, and insisted on an immediate request 
for an armistice. In the afternoon the Kaiser, with- 
out consulting his military advisors and much to 
Ludendorff's disgust, issued his pronouncement on 
the introduction of Parliamentary Government and 
von Hertling ceased to be Chancellor. Ludendorff 
then sent one of his staff. Major Freiherr von der 
Bussche, to Berlin to explain to the Vice-Chancellor 
von Payer, who was in charge of the Administration 
while Prince Max of Baden was endeavouring to 
form a Government, that an immediate offer of 
peace must be made.^ Von Payer pressed for delay, 
pointing out that there was no Government in power 
to negotiate, but Hindenburg, who had accompanied 
the Kaiser to Berlin, immediately replied : 

1 Ludendorff 's account of these proceedings is contained in pages 383 
et seq. of his Reminiscences. He suppresses many of the documents I 
have quoted. 

162 



Armageddon 



Main Headquarters, Oct. 1, 1918. 1.30 p.m. 

To Major Frhr. von der Bussche, 

for Vice-Chancellor von Payer. 

Provided that a guarantee can be given between 7 and 
8 o'clock this evening that Prince Max of Baden is form- 
ing the Government, then I agree to postponement until 
to-morrow morning. 

Should there, however, be any doubt about the forma- 
tion of the Government, then I must insist that the 
declaration be made known to the foreign powers to-night. 

(Signed) von Hindenbukg. 

Made known to His Excellency von Payer on October 1, 
^ P'^' (Signed) Frhr. von der Bussche. 

This note was naturally assumed in Berlin to 
be a cry of despair, and when we consider the events 
which led up to it this seems to be the only possible 
interpretation. It is now maintained in defense of 
Hindenburg and Ludendorff that the object of this 
startling message, to which Ludendorff makes no 
reference in his book, was to hasten the formation 
of the new Government, but the formation of a 
Government could not by any stretch of imagina- 
tion be supposed to influence the military situation 
on the front, and there was no reason, if that situa- 
tion had not been held at German Army Head- 
quarters to be desperate, why Prince Max should 
not have been given as much time as he needed to 
form his Administration. Ever since Haig's vic- 
tory of August 8 Ludendorff had been pressing his 

163 



The Last Four Months 



Government to open negotiations, because he was 
then convinced that Germany's mihtary position 
must go from bad to worse. It seems more than 
probable that, when the Hindenburg Hne was broken, 
he wanted an immediate armistice, because he feared 
that a general collapse was imminent and that he 
might, if he could not obtain a cessation of hos- 
tilities, be forced before long to accept an uncondi- 
tional surrender. It is absurd to suppose that he, 
with his great military experience, could have imag- 
ined that the Allied and Associated Powers would 
agree to any terms of armistice, after they had just 
won the greatest victory in the whole course of the 
war, unless those terms made it impossible for Ger- 
many to resume the struggle in any form. An offer 
to conclude peace made immediately after the 
strongest German defenses had been pierced is obvi- 
ously very different to such an offer put forward 
when the Hindenburg line was still intact, and could 
in the circumstances be nothing less than an open 
acknowledgment of defeat. It is, therefore, only 
reasonable to suppose that Hindenburg and Luden- 
dorff believed that their armies had been decisively 
beaten and that there was no better alternative 
to such an acknowledgment. The defense that 
they were influenced by the political rather than 
by the military situation has been put forward in 
Germany in support of the fiction that the German 
army was unbeaten, and that it was the politicians 
and the German public who lost their heads and 

164 



Armageddon 



surrendered when it was still possible for the Ger- 
man army to v/ring favourable terms from us. 

This defense is shown to be untenable by a state- 
ment made on October 2 on the military situation 
to the party leaders of the Reichstag by Major 
Freiherr von der Bussche, who as Ludendorff admits 
had been carefully coached by him and presented 
his views correctly. The statement ran : 

In a few days the situation has fundamentally changed. 
The collapse of the Bulgarian front has entirely upset our 
disposition of troops. Our communications with Con- 
stantinople were threatened, as well as the shipping route 
indispensable for the transport of our supplies on the 
Danube. We were compelled, if we were not to leave 
the Entente a free hand in the Balkans, to send German 
and Austro-Hungarian divisions ear-marked for the 
Western Front to those regions, abandoning the Black Sea 
and Roumania. We were obliged to make an immediate 
decision. The entrainment of our troops had already 
begun. We have every justification for hoping that the 
situation in the Balkans may be re-established, at all 
events sufficiently to guard our own interests. Unfortu- 
nately, as I shall explain, this cannot be done without great 
detriment to the situation as a whole. Almost simulta- 
neously with the offensive in Macedonia, violent enemy 
attacks have been made in the West. They have not 
found us unprepared. All possible measures have been 
taken to hold them up. Divisions from the East were on 
the way to relieve the sorely tried divisions in the West. 
Unfortunately a portion of these troops had to be diverted 
to the Balkans. The last men capable of bearing arms 
had been withdrawn from the East. We calmly awaited 
the decisive battle. The Entente knew how to conceal 

165 



The Last Four Months 



from us where the attacks would take place. From the 
sea to Switzerland preparations for the attack were in 
progress. The most extensive was against Lorraine and 
the Sundgau, and we were forced to distribute our reserves 
and to keep the whole front in a state of readiness for the 
attack. Considerable forces had to be stationed, espe- 
cially in Lorraine and in the Sundgau, for the defense of 
German territory. 

After carrying out the necessary movements, we were 
absolutely convinced that we should emerge victorious 
from the coming battles, and that we should be able to 
break the opposition of our enemies by the enormous 
losses which we anticipated they would suffer. Conse- 
quently, by putting in reserves at the right time, we 
have been able to hold up the enemy at all those places 
where, by means of tanks, by surprise attacks or superi- 
ority in numbers, he has penetrated our lines. The fight- 
ing of the last six days may be termed successful for us, 
in spite of the loss of prisoners and material. 

In comparison with our successes in the spring offen- 
sive the enemy has made little progress. In the majority 
of cases his continuous onslaughts have been countered 
with unusual obstinacy on the part of our troops. Ac- 
cording to our own reports the enemy has suffered the 
heaviest losses. 

The majority of our troops have fought splendidly 
and made superhuman efforts. Their old brave spirit 
has not died out. The numerical superiority of the enemy 
has not been able to terrorise our men. Officers and men 
vie with each other in deeds of valour. 

In spite of these facts, the High Command has been 
compelled to come to the enormously difficult decision 
that in all human probability there is no longer any pros- 
pect of forcing the enemy to sue for peace. Two factors 
have had a decisive influence on our decision, namely, 

166 



Armageddon 



tanks and our reserves. The enemy has made use of 
tanks in unexpectedly large numbers. In cases where 
they have suddenly emerged in huge masses from smoke 
clouds, our men were completely unnerved. Tanks 
broke through our foremost lines, making a way for their 
infantry, reaching our rear, and causing local panics, 
which entirely upset our battle control. When we were 
able to locate them our anti-tank guns and our artillery 
speedily put an end to them. But the mischief had al- 
ready been done, and solely owing to the success of the 
tanks we have suffered enormous losses in prisoners, and 
this had unexpectedly reduced our strength and caused 
a more speedy wastage of our reserves than we had antici- 
pated. We were not in a position to make use of similar 
masses of German tanks. Our manufacturers, under the 
existing pressure, were absolutely unable to supply them 
in large numbers, without causing other more important 
things to be neglected. The question of reserves has, 
however, been the decisive factor. The army entered 
the fray with depleted numbers. 

In spite of using every possible device, the strength 
of our battalions sank from about 800 in April, to 540 by 
the end of September. And these numbers were only 
secured by the disbanding of 22 infantry divisions (66 
infantry regiments). The Bulgarian defeat has eaten up 
7 more divisions. There is no prospect whatever of rais- 
ing the strength. The current reserves, consisting of men 
who are convalescent, combed-out men, etc., will not even 
cover the losses of a quiet winter campaign. The inclu- 
sion of the 1900 class will only increase the strength of the 
battalions by 100, and that is the last of our reserves. 
The losses of the battle which is now in progress are, as I 
have stated, unexpectedly large, especially as regards 
officers. That is a decisive factor. If the troops are to 
stem the onslaught or to attack they require more than 

167 



The Last Four Months 



ever the example of their officers. The latter must, and 
have, sacrificed themselves unreservedly. The regi- 
mental commanders and leaders fought in the front lines 
together with their men. I will give one example only. 
In two days of fighting one division lost all its officers, 
dead or wounded, three regimental commanders were 
killed. The small number of reserve officers has sunk to 
nothing. The same applies to the N.C.O.'s. The enemy, 
owing to the help he has received from America, is in a 
position to make good his losses. The American troops, 
as such, are not of special value, or in any way superior 
to our men. In those cases in which, owing to numbers 
alone, they gained an initial success, they were finally 
held at bay by our troops. They were, however, able 
to take over large portions of the front, thereby permit- 
ting the English and French to liberate some of their 
experienced divisions and in this way form an almost in- 
exhaustible supply of reserves. 

Up till now our reserves have been adequate to fill the 
gaps and drafts have duly arrived. The hardest at- 
tacks were repulsed. The fighting was described to be 
of unparalleled severity. Then our reserves began to fail. 
If the enemy continues the attack, the situation may de- 
mand a withdrawal from extensive sectors of the front. 
We can continue this kind of warfare for a measurable 
space of time, we can cause the enemy heavy losses, 
devastating the country in our retreat, but we cannot 
win the war. 

This decision and these events caused the idea to ripen 
in the minds of the Field-Marshal and Ludendorfi' to 
propose to the Kaiser the breaking-off of hostilities, so 
as to spare the German people and their Allies further 
sacrifice. Just as our great offensive of July 15 was 
abandoned, when the sacrifice entailed no longer war- 
ranted its continuation, so the decision now had to be 

168 



Armageddon 



taken that it was hopeless to proceed with the war. There 
is still time. The German army is still strong enough to 
hold the enemy for months, to achieve local successes 
and to expose the enemy to fresh sacrifices. But every day 
brings the enemy nearer his goal, and will make him less 
inclined to conclude a peace with us which will be satis- 
factory on our side. 

Therefore no time must be lost. Every day the situa- 
tion may become worse, and give the enemy the oppor- 
tunity of recognising our momentary weakness, which 
might have the most evil consequences for peace pros- 
pects as well as for the military situation. Neither the 
army nor the Homeland should do anything which would 
make our weakness apparent; on the other hand, the 
army and the Homeland must stand together more closely 
than before. Simultaneously with the peace offer a 
united front must be shown at home, so that the enemy 
recognise our unbending will to continue the war, if the 
enemy will not make peace with us, or only a humiliating 
one. If this should be, then the endurance of the army 
will depend on a firm attitude at home, and on the power 
of the Homeland to inspire the army. 

This is a very human statement. It contains the 
excuses and explanations of men who find themselves 
beaten and are endeavouring to shuflle out of their 
responsibility. Much is laid to the account of Bul- 
garia, who by collapsing unwarrantably has upset 
the best laid plans of the German Great Head- 
quarters. Ludendorff's advocate says truly that 
the last man capable of bearing arms had been 
withdrawn from the East. For some time before 
the end of September the German divisions on the 

169 



The Last Four Months 



Russian front had been combed out and the fittest 
men had been sent westwards to help make good 
the losses m France. It is obvious that the Ger- 
man battalions in the Western Front would not 
have been permitted to fall almost to half their 
proper strength, and that twenty-two divisions 
would not have been disbanded had there been men 
in the East available for service in the West. 

The situation on the Bulgarian front began to be 
critical on September 19, and by no possibility could 
troops starting westwards after that date have been 
in time to save the Hindenburg line. Therefore 
the statement that "the collapse of the Bulgarian 
front has entirely upset our disposition of troops" 
is a gross exaggeration intended to throw dust in 
the eyes of the Reichstag leaders and save the face 
of the General Staff. The defeat of Bulgaria was 
certain to bring down Austria sooner or later and 
made the position of Germany hopeless, but the 
General Staff knew quite well that it would be 
many months before the Allies would be able to 
attack the southern frontiers of Germany, and 
that, vast as was the political effect of these events, 
they had no immediate influence upon the military 
situation in France. Bulgaria had asked for an 
armistice on September 25, for she was very anxious 
to get it concluded before Mackensen, who was 
hurrying troops towards Sofia, could intervene. 
The armistice was signed on September 29, and the 
fact that Bulgaria had asked for terms and had sent 

170 



Armageddon 



plenipotentiaries to meet Franchet d'Esperey was 
notified to the world in our Wireless Press Summary 
of September 28. These facts must therefore have 
been known to German Great Headquarters on 
October 2, but not a word is said of them to the 
Reichstag leaders, who are led to believe that "the 
situation in the Balkans may be re-established." 

After this exordium on Bulgaria's delinquencies 
comes the true reason for the demand for the imme- 
diate opening of peace negotiations. The German 
armies in the West are in imminent peril, and if 
hostilities are not stopped promptly they may be 
unable to escape an overwhelming disaster. That is 
in plain English what the statement means. The 
German troops have been fighting splendidly, and 
the General Staff had made every possible prepara- 
tion to meet the expected attack, but our supe- 
riority in tanks and the exhaustion of the German 
reserves have made the position hopeless. 

I had written all that I have said in the earlier 
part of this chapter on the effect of our tanks before 
this document came into my hands, and it is inter- 
esting to see how completely it confirms all the 
information on this point which we had obtained 
before the armistice. Not less interesting is the 
tribute paid to Foch's strategy. Great Head- 
quarters were in fear of attack along the whole 
front from the sea to Switzerland, and the remark- 
able statement is made that the most extensive 
preparations for attack were against Lorraine and 

171 



The Last Four Months 



the Sundgau, that is the frontier district of Alsace, 
east of Belfort. This is evidence of the eiffect of 
Pershing's victory of St. Mihiel and of the activ- 
ities of the Second Army in simulating an olBFensive 
towards Briey and Metz. It is difficult to make 
this anxiety square with the disparaging remarks 
about the American troops, for the German General 
Staff must have known that the majority of the 
troops on the Lorraine front were American. This 
is probably another attempt to save the face of the 
General Staff, who had declared roundly that the 
Americans would not be able to train troops to fight 
in any numbers during 1918. As we know, prepa- 
rations for an offensive into Lorraine were not com- 
pleted until some time later, and at this time there 
were no preparations at all for an invasion of Al- 
sace. Therefore this statement is an admission 
that Foch had very completely hoodwinked Luden- 
dorff. Most interesting of all is the evidence of 
the efficacy of Foch's method of exhausting the 
German reserves before fighting his great battle. 
The picture drawn of the state of the German army 
is impressive, and tallies exactly with information 
received from other sources. Truly the question 
of reserves was the "decisive factor." The Ger- 
man reserves were exhausted and therefore there was 
nothing to be done but to make peace as quickly 
as possible. As the staff officer naively remarks, 
the decision had to be taken that it was hopeless 
to proceed with the war for the same reasons as 

172 



Armageddon 



led to the abandonment of the great offensive of 
July 15. The offensive of July 15 was abandoned 
because the Germans were soundly beaten in the 
second battle of the Marne. On October 2 the 
Great Headquarters were compelled to advise that 
the struggle should be abandoned because the Ger- 
man armies had been beaten in the battle of Arma- 
geddon. 

On the morning of October 3 Hindenburg con- 
firmed the statement made the previous day by 
his representative in the following memorandum : 

To THE Imperial Chancellor. Berlin, Oct. 3. 

The High Command insists on the immediate issue of 
a peace offer to our enemies in accordance with the decision 
of Monday, September 29, 1918. In consequence of the 
collapse of the Macedonian front, and the inevitable 
resultant weakening of our reserves in the West, and also 
the impossibility of making good the heavy losses which 
have occurred during the battles of the last few days, 
there is no prospect, humanly speaking, of forcing our 
enemies to sue for peace. The enemy, on the other hand, 
is continuing to throw fresh reserves into the battle. 

The German army still stands firm and is defending 
itself against all attacks. The situation, however, is 
growing more critical daily, and may force the High 
Command to momentous decisions. In these circum- 
stances it is imperative to stop the fighting in order to 
spare the German people and their allies unnecessary 
sacrifices. Every day of delay costs thousands of brave 
soldiers their lives. (Signed) von Hindenburg. 

The appeal to the Homeland to stand firm, with 
which the gloomy review of the situation made to 

173 



The Last Four Months 



the leaders of political parties ends, is curious as 
coming from men who were pressing with all their 
energy for an immediate opening of negotiations 
to men who were anxious to delay so fatal a step 
until they were better assured that it was unavoid- 
able. Von Payer in particular seems to have taken 
a much calmer view of the situation than did the 
soldiers, and before acceding to counsels of despair 
he wanted to know more. On October 3 he there- 
fore sent Hindenburg the following memorandum : 

Berlin, October 3, 1918. 
Before coming to any decision as to a peace move, I 
would request your Excellency to answer the following 
questions : — 

(1) How long can the army hold the enemy the other 
side of the German frontier ? 

(2) Must the Chief Army Command expect a collapse, 
and if so, when ? 

(3) Is the military situation so critical that action 
should immediately be taken to bring about an armistice ? 

(4) In the event of your reply to question 3 being in 
the affirmative, is the Chief Army Command aware that 
a peace move, under pressure of the critical military 
situation, may lead to the loss of German territory, namely, 
Alsace-Lorraine and the purely Polish districts of the 
Eastern provinces ? 

(5) Does the Chief Army Command agree to the 
despatch of the enclosed draft note ? 

I should be grateful to your Excellency for an immediate 
answer. — (Signed) Payer, Representative Imperial 
Chancellor. 

174 



Armageddon 



The draft note referred to is presumably the first 
request for an armistice sent to President Wilson. 
Prince Max had arrived in Berlin, and he was no 
more eager than his Vice-Chancellor to hoist the 
flag of surrender, but the soldiers were insistent. 
The same day (October 3) Hindenburg gave the 
following answer to von Payer's questions : 

October 3. 

(1) The question cannot be answered in exactly the 
form in which it is put. The holding of the front depends 
on many factors, amongst others on the resources and 
ability of the enemy to continue his attacks, and on the 
duration of our power of resistance. 

At present the German army is standing firm. It will 
withdraw from sectors if forced, clinging toughly to enemy 
soil. The duration of such withdrawals cannot be deter- 
mined beforehand. But it is to be hoped that they may 
protect German soil until next spring. 

(2) Answer to question 1 applies to this question. I 
do not believe that there will be any general collapse. As 
long as valuable reserves are at hand the yielding of the 
front consequent on enemy break-throughs need not 
have such a result. 

(3) This question is answered by my communication 
of October 3 to the Imperial Chancellor. 

(4) Unless things should change, the Chief Army 
Command will take into consideration the surrender of 
small French-speaking portions of Alsace-Lorraine. For 
it is no question of the cession of German territory in 
the East. 

(5) Draft note was advised, but not enclosed. 

These answers and the memorandum to which 
they refer are very cautious, but leave no room for 

175 



The Last Four Months 



doubt as to the opinion at Headquarters. The 
holding of the front is possible ; the army may be 
able to resist until the spring; the wholesale sur- 
render of Alsace-Lorraine need not be considered 
unless things change, but it is impossible to guarantee 
any of these things. The situation is highly critical 
and at any moment it may be necessary to take mo- 
mentous decisions, that is to say, disaster may 
overtake the German armies. Therefore it is 
imperative that negotiations should be opened at 
once. 

On October 4 Prince Max of Baden became 
Imperial Chancellor, and the next day the first 
request for an armistice was despatched to President 
Wilson. 

The greatest battle in the world's history had been 
fought and won. There was to be bitter fighting 
before the end came, for Ludendorff made an attempt 
to rally which met with some measure of success, 
and the discipline of the German armies, which in 
the first days of October appeared to be cracking, 
again for a time asserted its influence. None the 
less, it was the great battle begun on September 26 
which decided the issue of the war. This battle 
was so vast that no single name has ever been sug- 
gested for it.^ During its course we British fought 

^ While this book was in the press Mr. Louis Madelin in the August 
number of the Reme des deux Mondes has called this great struggle " the 
battle of France." This name just fails to be apposite, for an impor- 
tant part of the battle was fought in Belgium. 

176 



Armageddon 



the second battle of Cambrai, the battle of St. 
Quentin and took a great part in the battle of 
Flanders, the Americans the battle of the Meuse- 
Argonne, the French the battle of Champagne, while 
the Belgians with French help fought the battle of 
Flanders. These great struggles, however, made up a 
whole, conceived and directed by one man. Foch's 
long-thought-out plans and careful preparations 
had their reward. He was ably supported by Haig, 
Pershing, Petain and King Albert, and each of the 
Allied armies on the Western Front had played its 
glorious part in Armageddon. Foch had worked 
patiently and skilfully up to a great climax, and 
when the climax was reached the whole of the huge 
machinery under his control had been set in motion 
and every one of its parts had answered to his 
controlling hand. 



177 



CHAPTER V 

LUDENDORFF TrIES TO RaLLY 

The Delays to the Allied Advance — The Difficulties 
of the Americans — Ludendorff's Plan of Retreat — 
How It Was Defeated 

On none of the three fronts of attack which made 
up Foch's great battle was it easy to gather the fruits 
of victory. In Flanders King Albert and Plumer, 
having crossed the ridges, had behind them ground 
over which the tide of war had ebbed and flowed for 
more than four years, and now that it had been 
finally turned back it had left a morass of stinking 
mud which had obliterated every road and track. 
Behind the main British battle lay the deepest zone 
of devastation on the whole long front. From Vimy 
Ridge to the eastern outskirts of Amiens, and thence 
through St. Quentin northwards by Cambrai to 
Douai, in an area of over one thousand square miles, 
there was hardly a house to be found intact, no 
village which had not been gutted; the surface of 
the ground was torn and blasted by shell-fire, the 
vegetation withered by poison gas, the roads had 
been destroyed, the railways torn up, and all the 
bridges over the many rivers and canals blown 
down. Behind Gouraud in Champagne lay a 

178 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



somewhat narrower but equally horrible belt of 
desolation. In rear of the Americans were the 
battlefields of Verdun. 

Therefore, on all the fronts the repair of the 
communications behind the armies was a stupendous 
undertaking, which not all the skill and tireless 
energy of the engineers and working parties could 
complete quickly. Without food, ammunition and 
military stores the victorious troops could not get 
forward, even against a badly shaken enemy, and 
these could not be brought up to them until the 
roads and railways had been to some extent restored. 
So everywhere progress was for a time slow. The 
Belgians were within two miles of Roulers by Octo- 
ber 1, but it was not until October 14 that King 
Albert, having bridged the muddy gulf behind him, 
was able to advance and enter the town. Cambrai 
had been enveloped north and south by British 
troops on September 30, but the Germans were not 
completely cleared out of the town until October 9. 
Debeney, with the First French Army, had entered 
St. Quentin on October 1, but by the tenth he was 
only eight miles east of the place. Only on the 
front between Cambrai and St. Quentin was any 
rapid progress made. Gouraud had by September 
29 advanced about six miles through the German 
lines, but by October 9 his men were only one and 
a half miles farther forward. 

Neither Gouraud's advance to the west of the 
forest nor that of the Americans to the east of it 

179 



The Last Four Months 



had been sufficiently deep to force the Germans 
out of the Argonne. Now that forest runs roughly 
from northeast to southwest along a series of rough 
ridges which separate the valleys of the upper Aisne 
and of the Aire. These forest-clad ridges gave the 
Germans splendid vantage ground from which to 
harass with artillery and machine-gun fire the Allied 
troops on either side of the Argonne, and if these 
troops were to get on there was nothing for it but 
to clear the forest. By September 28 the American 
left had penetrated some three miles into the Ar- 
gonne, but on that date the centre was nearly five 
miles ahead on the outskirts of Exermont, and was 
being worried by the German guns firing from the 
Argonne heights into their flanks and rear. To 
clear these heights and enable the centre to advance, 
the American left had to force its way forward 
through nine miles of the most difficult country on 
the whole Western Front. Under modern shell-fire 
woods become an almost impenetrable tangle of 
fallen timber, which affords ideal nests for the 
enemy's machine-guns. This tangle was made still 
more difficult by cunningly placed wire entangle- 
ments and stretches of rabbit netting. The forest 
is cut up by deep ravines with almost precipitous 
sides, which made it very hard for the infantry to 
keep touch, while tanks could be of no help to them, 
and even the most experienced artillery would have 
been put to it to give them support. It was a 
question of hard slogging infantry fighting, and the 

180 



Ludendorfi Tries to Rally 



American infantryman did slog hard, and after 
eleven days of continuous, grim, dogged effort, by 
October 10 he had won his way through. 

Simultaneously with the advance in the Argonne, 
which fell to the left of the 1st American Corps, the 
right of that corps and the 5th and 3rd Corps worked 
their way forward to the latitude of the northern 
edge of the forest, while east of the Meuse sufficient 
progress was made, in conjunction with French 
troops, to safeguard the flank of the troops west of 
the river. In all this fighting the casualties of the 
American First Army were very heavy and the hard- 
ships imposed on the troops severe. It is difficult 
to see how this could have been avoided in the 
circumstances in which the battle was fought. 
There was undoubtedly lack of cooperation between 
the infantry and the artillery and between the air- 
craft and both. It is equally true that the eagerness 
of the American infantry to get forward landed them 
in awkward salients, in which they suffered very 
severely, and that attempts to rush machine-gun 
nests by direct attack had to be paid for at a heavy 
price. 

In fact, the experiences of the American army in 
this their first great continuous offensive battle were 
in some respects similar to our own experiences in the 
first battle of the Somme. No one will maintain that 
the quality of the infantry of the British army, 
which in the summer of 1918 drove the Germans 
across the Somme battlefields into and through the 

181 



The Last Tour Months 



Hindenburg line, can be compared with the quahty 
of the infantry who, two years before, won their 
way up the Somme heights. Then the pick of the 
manhood of the British Empire fought and fell, while 
in 1918 the ranks contained a high proportion of 
middle-aged men and boys. Yet in 1916 we gained 
comparatively little at a great price, and in 1918 
we won much with far less sacrifice of life. The 
deterioration in the quality of the German troops 
in those two years does not account for the change. 
The essential difference in the two battles is that 
the first was won by sheer inexperienced valour, 
the second by valour combined with skill. We 
have learned in this war that it is possible to train 
the individual soldier and get him to meet the terrible 
conditions of the modern battlefield in far less time 
than had been supposed to be necessary. The 
clerk from the counting-house, the ploughman from 
the fields, and the hand from the factory have all 
shown that with a few months' instruction they can 
acquit themselves, under conditions such as man 
has never been called upon before to face, better 
than the best of the soldiers of old, provided they 
are sent to take their places in an organisation 
which has been perfected and of which all the parts 
are working smoothly together. 

Contrary to general expectation, the great war 
has shown that civilisation and education, by develop- 
ing intelligence, have improved the fighting powers 
of the race, that the trained will can triumph over 

182 



Ludenclorff Tries to Rally 



the weaknesses of the flesh. But the war has also 
shown conclusively that the experience of the past 
still holds good in that the training of the individual 
is a very small step toward the making of an army. 
It is even a shorter step to-day than it was in the past, 
for the organisation of the modern army is infinitely 
more complex than was that of the armies of old. 

In 1918 all the parts of the British army had 
learned, both by long and bitter experience and 
as the result of Sir Douglas Haig's careful and 
systematic teaching, to work together for a com- 
mon end. Commanders of all grades had learned 
their jobs, the staffs knew their business, infantry, 
cavalry, artillery, engineers, trench mortars, machine- 
guns, tanks and aircraft knew each what the other 
could do and what the other needed. Sir Douglas 
Haig had, from the time when he assumed com- 
mand of our armies in France, established a system 
of instruction which was continually developed and 
improved until in 1918 it was the most complete 
organisation of its kind which has ever assisted an 
army in the field. Unfortunately, from the middle 
of 1916 — when the first battle of the Somme began 
— until the German attack in Flanders ended on 
April 29, 1918, the army had not the opportunity 
to make full use of the means of training at its dis- 
posal. The first battle of the Somme merged in 
the battle of the Ancre, which ended in the 
German retreat to the Hindenburg line. Then 
came in succession the battle of Arras, the battle of 

183 



The Last Four Months 



Messines Ridge, and the third battle of Ypres, 
while the winter of 1917-1918 had to be devoted 
to preparation, with depleted ranks, for the expected 
German offensive. The respite which the Germans 
allowed us between the end of April and the begin- 
ning of August, 1918, afforded us the longest period 
of good weather for training and instruction which 
we had enjoyed since the battle of the Somme, and 
it proved invaluable. The result of that period of 
reconstruction, when the full benefit of Haig's in- 
structional arrangements were felt, showed them- 
selves in^ the battle of Amiens and in the victories 
which followed it. 

Sir Douglas Haig has often been accused of having 
maintained an extravagant organisation behind his 
front at the cost of the fighting ranks. He was 
looking forward confidently to the day when he 
would get his enemy on the move, and when that 
day came he was ready. It was the perfection of 
the organisation of the services behind the British 
lines, a perfection which was the outcome of long 
experience, and the scale on which these services 
were equipped, as much as the increased skill of 
the fighting ranks, which enabled the British army 
to fight continuously and victoriously for three 
months and keep up that succession of hammer 
blows to which Foch has paid a generous tribute. 

The American army had had little of the war 
training which had taught the British army its 
lesson. Many of the divisions which fought in 

184 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



the Meuse-Argonne battle went into action then 
for the first time. That being so, it was inevitable 
that there should be defects in cooperation and that 
a high price should be paid for victory. I have 
already described the difficulties of the ground over 
which the American troops fought. The difficulties 
which confronted the services of supply were not 
less formidable. On the stretch of eighteen miles 
between the Meuse and western edge of the Argonne 
— a front of battle occupied by nine American di- 
visions in the first line, equivalent to eighteen 
British or French divisions — there were only two 
main roads running in the direction of the advance, 
one of them on the extreme right flank, along the 
valley of the Meuse, exposed to artillery fire from 
the heights in the hands of the Germans on the 
east bank of the river, the other on the left flank 
along the eastern edge of the Argonne, exposed to 
artillery fire from the forest. There was one more 
road, which ran through Montfaucon, parallel to 
the American line of advance, but it was a very poor 
one, and the bottom soon fell out of it under the 
combination of wet weather and a never-ending 
stream of traffic. Between these on the front of 
the main American advance there were only narrow 
cross-roads connecting the villages, and these roads 
had been shelled to pieces. The hilly and wooded 
nature of the country made the task of constructing 
new roads, of repairing the existing ones, and of 
laying railways very laborious, and consequently 

185 



The Last Four Months 



in the early stages of the battle the transport had 
to be crowded on to the very few roads which were 
fit for traffic. 

I On September 28 the main American advance 
east of the Argonne had penetrated through the 
German lines to a depth of seven miles. Eleven 
days later it was barely two miles farther forward. 
This slow progress was by no means only due to the 
necessity of clearing the Argonne, for the centre 
and right of the First American Army was not 
troubled by flanking fire from the forest. The 
difficulties of getting forward food and ammunition 
and of sending up timely reinforcements and of 
relieving tired troops caused even more delay. Just 
as happened in our early battles, so in this, the first 
great American effort in the war, some divisions 
had to give ground because they could not be sup- 
ported in time. The roads behind the army, too 
few and too poor to take the immense amount of 
transport which was seeking to find its way forward, 
became hopelessly congested, and in some cases 
masses of vehicles were so jammed that they could 
not be moved either forward or backward for long 
periods. The consequence of this was that it was 
not possible to get a regular supply of food up to 
the troops in front, and cases occurred in which the 
men did not receive their usual rations for four days. 
There has been a great deal of talk of the break- 
down of the American administrative services, and 
unquestionably things did go wrong ; but the critics 

186 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



who lay stress on the defects of organisation which 
showed themselves are apt to overlook the con- 
ditions under which battle was joined. It was a 
question of attempting to force a decision by a 
great combined attack on the main German defensive 
positions at the end of September or of deferring a 
decisive attack until the following spring. It is 
probably true that no French or British staff would, 
after long experience of previous failure, have ad- 
vised an attack on the Meuse-Argonne front until 
elaborate improvements and extensions of the roads 
and railways behind the front of attack had been 
carried out, and until equally elaborate preparations 
for prolonging those roads and railways into the 
territory captured from the Germans had been 
completed. It is probably equally true that French 
and British soldiers, after the bitter lessons of the 
past, would not have attacked with any confidence 
unless they had ocular evidence that everything 
had been done beforehand to help them forward. 
There are times and occasions in war when the val- 
our of ignorance has its advantages. With greater 
experience the American infantry would have 
learned to overcome the German machine-guns 
with less loss of life, and the services of supply 
would have worked more smoothly. Had the 
American army waited to gain that experience, 
the war would certainly have been prolonged by at 
least six months, and the cost in life would cer- 
tainly have been far greater than it was. 

187 



The Last Four Months 



Pershing must have taken all these factors into 
consideration when he threw in his vote for fighting 
the great battle which began on September 26. He 
decided that the vigour and valour of his troops 
would more than counterbalance their lack of 
battle experience, and he was justified in the result. 
From September 26 until the Kriemhilde system 
was finally broken, by making the fullest use of his 
man power, for 630,000 American troops were en- 
gaged in this battle, he continuously menaced the 
Metz-Mezieres railway, and forced Ludendorff to 
employ more than forty divisions in an ineffectual 
effort to stem his advance. The American attack, 
therefore, formed an essential part of Foch's plan, 
and had it not been successful it is almost certain 
that the Germans would have been able to with- 
draw in fairly good order to the Meuse, and that we 
should not have forced them to sign an armistice 
on November 11 ; but before it was successful there 
were many delays. The first rush forward of Sep- 
tember 26 changed to slow progress and a long strug- 
gle as much against the difficulties of Nature as 
against the resistance of the enemy. 

During the first week in October, then, the Allies 
were, for the reason which I have explained, delayed 
on all the main fronts of attack to a greater or less 
degree. This gave the Germans time to pull them- 
selves together to some extent, and Ludendorff 
began to see a possibility of re-forming his armies 
on a new line. There was a good deal of exaggera- 

188 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



tion at various periods of the war on our side as to 
the prowess of the Germans as diggers, and they 
were reported to have defensive lines constructed 
right back to the Rhine. These existed only in the 
excited imaginations of those who at one time were 
disposed to believe that in matters military the 
Germans were demigods, but it was true that when 
the Siegfried position was broken through Luden- 
dorff still had defenses to which to withdraw. His 
military policy at this time is indicated in Hinden- 
burg's note of October 3 to the Vice-Chancellor. 
The army was to fall back as deliberately as possible, 
when retreat was necessary, to successive positions, 
and he hoped to be able to keep the Allied armies 
out of Germany at least until the spring. This 
programme entailed a slow retirement to the Meuse, 
and a prolonged stand on that river when it was 
reached. His left flank, opposite the Americans, 
was the nearest part of his lines to the Meuse, and 
his right, in Belgium, farthest from that river. 
Therefore, the two first steps necessary for a re- 
adjustment of his front were to delay the Americans 
and to begin withdrawing his right from Flanders. 
It was equally important that the British advance 
through Cambrai towards Maubeuge should be 
checked, for the British were considerably nearer 
to the Meuse at Namur than were the German 
troops about Ostend and Roulers. Lastly, it was 
necessary to withdraw from the bulge in the Ger- 
man line west of Laon, for the position there became 

189 



The Last Four Months 



daily more precarious once the Siegfried line was 
broken. 

In looking over his map ^ Ludendorff saw that by 
beginning to retire at once in Flanders he might 
hope to establish his troops behind the Ghent 
Canal and the River Scheldt as far south as Valen- 
ciennes. With his northern flank on the Dutch 
frontier east of Zeebrugge, and a formidable water 
obstacle in front of his positions to protect them 
against the dreaded tank, there was a chance of 
gaining the time necessary to organise an orderly 
and gradual withdrawal from Belgium, provided 
Haig and Debeney could be checked sufficiently 
long between Valenciennes and the Oise. This was 
the weakest link in his new chain. The beginnings 
of a defensive position had been prepared con- 
necting the Scheldt south of Valenciennes with the 
Oise west of Guise. This line, to which the Ger- 
mans had given the name of the Hermann position, 
was far from complete, because it had always been 
supposed that it would take us so long to work our 
way through the Siegfried system, if we ever 
seemed likely to penetrate it, that there would be 
plenty of time to complete the Hermann position. 
However, the greater part of the Hermann position 
followed the course of the River Selle, and had great 
natural strength, which it was hoped would com- 
pensate for the lack of artificial protection. 

^The positions described in the following pages are shown on 
Map II. 

190 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



South of the Oise Ludendorff was better prepared 
to meet and stay the progress of his enemies. East 
of the St. Gobain massif and of Laon he had the 
Hundung position, which extended as far south as 
the Aisne and connected with the Brunehilde position. 
Both these positions were well fortified, particularly 
the latter, which stood in the way of Gouraud's 
advance. The German trenches ran along the north 
bank of the river, through Rethel, towards the 
Argonne, and the Aisne lay immediately in front of 
them, while the north bank here dominates the south 
bank. It was, therefore, a very formidable obstacle 
to attack directly, and might be counted upon to 
delay Gouraud for a considerable time. East of the 
Argonne as far as the Meuse ran the Kriemhilde 
position, which had a depth of some two miles, and 
had not yet been reached by the Americans. East 
of the Meuse and across the base of the St. Mihiel 
salient there was the Michel position, which was well 
entrenched. Behind the Brunehilde and the Kriem- 
hilde positions there were the Hagen and Freya 
positions, which, like the Hermann position, had 
only been sketched out. 

On the existence of these various defensive lines, 
natural or artificial, Ludendorff's plans for rallying 
his forces and keeping the Allies out of Germany 
until the spring of 1919 were based. He proposed 
to carry through an immediate and extensive retreat 
in Belgium, French Flanders and Artois, to abandon 
the Belgian coast, Bruges, Courtrai, Lille and Douai, 

191 



The Last Four Months 



and to establish his front behind the Scheldt through 
Ghent and Valenciennes. On the front of Haig's 
main attack he set about retiring to the Hermann 
position along the Selle, and hoped to compensate 
for its weakness by massing along it the troops he 
had economised by shortening his front in the north. 
He began a withdrawal of his centre from the St. 
Gobain massif and from Laon into the Hundung 
line, and prepared for a similar withdrawal in front 
of Gouraud into the Brunehilde lines. East of the 
Argonne his programme was to make the most of 
the natural difficulties of the country to delay the 
progress of the Americans towards the Kriemhilde 
position as long as possible. 

If the last phases of the war in the West are to 
be followed, it is important to understand this scheme 
of Ludendorff's and to appreciate both where and 
when he meant to stand and fight and where and 
when he meant to retreat. After the Hindenburg 
line was broken the front was in a continual state 
of flux; news arrived almost daily of fresh progress 
by the Allied forces, and it was difficult to discrimi- 
nate between victories won by hard fighting and the 
consequences of those victories. 

There was hard fighting before the enemy was 
completely smashed, for Ludendorff's plan was 
attended with a certain measure of success. By 
October 14, when King Albert was ready to attack 
again in Flanders, the arrangements for the German 
retreat were well advanced, and it was on the whole 

192 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



o 



well conducted, though the enemy's rearguards had 
to struggle to gain time, and in spite of their resist- 
ance he had to abandon numbers of guns and great 
quantities of stores of all kinds. Roulers fell to 
French troops on the fifteenth, Thourout was oc- 
cupied by the Belgians on the sixteenth, and the next 
day they entered Ostend. Plumer, meanwhile, had 
entered Menin and Courtrai and crossed the Lys. 
On October 18 the Fifth British Army, farther south, 
had found Lille evacuated by the enemy, and four 
days later the whole of the Belgian coast was in our 
hands, and the Germans had reached the line of the 
Scheldt from Valenciennes to Ghent. There have 
been many curious examples during the war of the 
difference between the mentality of the Germans 
and of other European peoples, but I doubt if there 
has been anything stranger than their conduct during 
their retreat through Flanders and Belgium. At the 
last moment before they retired they brought into 
many of the principal towns wagon-loads of the flags 
of the Allies, which included one peculiarly German 
invention, — a composite banner made up of the 
colours of their chief enemies, and hawked these 
round for sale to the inhabitants in order that they 
might decorate their houses fitly for the welcome to 
the incoming troops. It is out of the question that 
this traffic in their shame can have taken place with- 
out the assistance of the German authorities, who 
were not too proud to allow money to be made out 
of their defeat, but pretended shortly afterwards that 

193 



The Last Four Months 



they were too proud to acknowledge themselves 
beaten. 

The retreat of the German centre from the St. 
Gobain massif, Laon, and the Chemin-des-Dames 
and the neighbourhood of Reims was carried 
through in fairly good order, though about Reims 
it was hastened by the transfer to that neighbour- 
hood of the 2nd and 3rd American Divisions in 
succession. On October 13 the French entered 
Laon, and two days later found themselves con- 
fronted by the enemy in his new positions. Opposite 
Gouraud the Germans withdrew when on October 8 
the French attacked in force, into their Brunehilde 
position along the Aisne, from the west of Rethel, 
through Attigny, to Vouziers, just west of the 
northern edge of the Argonne. 

The German retreat from the main British front 
between Cambrai and St. Quentin was, however, 
not carried through according to Ludendorff's plan. 
By incessant and skilful work on the part of the 
engineers, bridges were thrown across the Canal du 
Nord and the St. Quentin Canal, and the roads were 
made possible for traffic, while farther back the rail- 
ways, both narrow and broad gauge, were repaired 
or relaid, so that as early as October 6, before the 
German rearguards had been organised, the Fourth 
and Third Armies were able to begin the second 
battle of Le Cateau. This battle culminated in a 
fine attack made on a front of seventeen miles 
by those armies at dawn on October 8. It was 

194 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



a bold measure to attempt to assemble in darkness, 
on ground torn up by shell-fire and seamed with 
trenches and with the wreckage of wire entangle- 
ments, such a mass of troops on so wide a front, but 
the time had come to be bold. The immediate 
results of this attack were that the 9th Corps, 2nd 
American Corps and 13th Corps of the Fourth Army, 
all greatly assisted by tanks, made very important 
progress in the direction of Le Cateau, while the 
Third Army was able to complete the encirclement 
of Cambrai on the south. Debeney, continuing his 
role of extending the battle front of the Fourth 
Army southwards, simultaneously drove the Germans 
back east of St. Quentin. 

The ultimate results were of much greater impor- 
tance in their effect upon Ludendorff's plan. The 
enemy's intended orderly retreat became a rout, and 
the roads behind his front converging on the bridges 
over the River Selle were blocked with troops and 
transport, so that the time which was to have been 
employed in the systematic occupation of the Her- 
mann position had to be devoted to restoring order 
amongst weary and dispirited troops and clearing 
away such of the impedimenta as could be saved 
from capture. On October 9 the Canadians entered 
Cambrai from the north and the 57th Division from 
the south, and drove the last Germans out of the 
town, while the Fourth and Third Armies, led by 
cavalry patrols, took up the pursuit of the enemy 
retiring towards the Selle, and drove him across the 

195 



The Last Four Months 



field of the first battle of Le Cateau, where Smith- 
Dorrien had fought von Kluck during the retreat 
from Mons. By October 12 the enemy was found 
to be established in the Hermann position, but his 
retreat to it had cost him 12,000 prisoners and 250 
guns. 

On the American front there was no question of 
a German retreat, and except in the northern part 
of the Argonne Forest the Americans had to fight 
hard for every yard of ground they gained. The 
slow struggle through the southern end of the forest 
had brought the Americans on October 1 to approxi- 
mately its centre, and for a week little or no progress 
was made. Then, fortunately, it became possible to 
apply the plan, which had been originally attempted 
and had failed, of forcing the Germans to evacuate 
the forest by advancing on both sides of it. On 
October 6 and 7 troops of the American 28th and 
82nd Divisions, after a desperately hard struggle, 
took the village and chateau of Chatel and the hills 
around it which dominate the eastern edge of the 
Argonne. On October 8 — that is, the same day 
on which the Third and Fourth British Armies 
made their dawn attack in the second battle of Le 
Cateau — Gouraud had, it will be remembered, be- 
gun his advance to the Aisne, and by the ninth his 
troops were in position along the greater part of the 
western edge of the forest. Fearful of being cut off, 
the Germans thereupon evacuated the Argonne, and 
on October 10 the 77th American Division was clear 

196 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



of the forest and in touch with the Germans on the 
outskirts of Grandpre. East of the Argonne there 
was no such rapid progress, and the Americans 
fought their way slowly on to the forward positions 
of the Kriemhilde system, with which they were 
everywhere in touch by October 14. Five days 
before this Pershing had handed over command of 
the First American Army to General Liggett, for 
the continued arrival of American troops had made 
it necessary to form a Second American Army of 
the troops occupying the Woevre front, east of the 
St. Mihiel salient and opposite Metz. 

Ludendorff appears to have been fairly well 
satisfied with the progress of his retreat by October 
16. His left and centre were by then back in their 
nev/ positions, which were strong, and his losses 
during the retreat, if heavy, had not been over- 
whelming. His right had not yet completed the 
retreat from Flanders behind the Scheldt, but he had 
good reason to believe that it would be able to do 
so. Accordingly on October 17 he spoke much more 
boldly to the German cabinet than he had done on 
October 1. Prince Max of Baden was proposing to 
pave the way for peace negotiations by offering to 
abandon unrestricted U-boat warfare and to guar- 
antee that the German troops would not destroy 
French and Belgium towns during their retreat. The 
rumblings of revolution were growing louder, and it 
was vitally necessary to make concessions to the 
popular party, which had lost all confidence in the 

197 



The Last Four Months 



Great General Staff, and were becoming more and 
more determined to enforce peace. 

It had become abundantly evident that the 
German people had only been induced to endure the 
rigours of the blockade and to hold on by the lavish 
promises of victory which had been given to them. 
It was therefore impossible, while the military 
situation on all fronts was going rapidly from bad to 
worse and decisions had to be taken quickly, to 
educate them to an attitude of endurance with the 
object of minimising the effects of defeat. The 
pretence that Germany had been fighting a defensive 
war, which had periodically been put forward by the 
Kaiser and his advisers whenever their campaign of 
conquest was checked, could not deceive any one, and 
least of all the German people. The popular senti- 
ment in regard to war was summed up in the phrase, 
"World power or downfall", the assumption being 
that there was no doubt as to which of these alter- 
natives would be Germany's fate. With rare skill 
the German Government and its military advisers 
had hitherto managed to obliterate the effect of their 
failure to obtain their chief aims by dazzling victories 
in secondary theatres of war. They had not 
succeeded in conquering France in 1914 according 
to plan, but this had been forgotten in the joy of 
gazing at the brilliant prospect opened up by the 
accession of Bulgaria, the overrunning of Serbia, and 
the opening of the road to the East. The conquest 
of Roumania had obliterated the memories of Ver- 

198 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



dun; the collapse of Russia and the victory of 
Caporetto had been ample compensation for the long, 
costly and unfruitful struggle on the Western Front 
during 1917. Now, however, there was no carrot to 
dangle in front of the donkey's nose. Even in an 
autocratic country it is not possible to deceive all the 
people all the time, and the German people knew 
in October, 1918, that the victory which had been 
promised to them could never be obtained. 

The revulsion of feeling and the collapse of con- 
fidence were such that no enthusiasm could be 
aroused for a war of endurance in defense of the 
Fatherland. Yet this was what Ludendorff pro- 
posed. He wished the negotiations to be continued 
with President Wilson, but refused to agree to the 
acceptance of any terms which would make Germany 
militarily defenseless. He protested energetically 
against the renunciation of the U-boat campaign, and 
claimed that the German army should be allowed to 
take any and every measure which would delay the 
enemies' advance. But while he was actually press- 
ing his views upon the German cabinet another blow 
had fallen upon him, and his new front had been 
broken. 

The enemy's position along the River Selle, which 
was the connecting link between the Scheldt and his 
lines south of the Oise, was, as I have said, naturally 
formidable. His left flank opposite Debeney's army 
rested on a series of very defensible wooded heights 
which divided the valleys of the Selle and the Oise. 

199 



The Last Four Months 



On the front of the Fourth British Army the Ger- 
mans held the eastern bank of the Selle, and had occu- 
pied the Kne of the railway which connects Le Cateau 
and Solesmes. This railway line runs through a 
series of embankments and cuttings, which provided 
the German infantry with excellent cover and their 
machine-gunners with positions from which they 
could sweep the valley, while the rolling heights be- 
hind gave their artillery splendid opportunities for 
dominating the approaches to the river. In front of 
the railway line a single, and as compared with the 
entanglements of the Hindenburg line not very for- 
midable, belt of barbed wire had been erected, but 
the Selle, ordinarily an insignificant stream, had 
been dammed by the enemy and was in flood, and 
in itself constituted a serious obstacle to infantry, 
which would have to force its way across in 
face of machine-gun fire. The sites for a strong 
trench system had been marked out by digging down 
to a depth of about one foot, but the German in- 
fantry and engineers, weary and dispirited by their 
defeats, had not the energy to complete these 
trenches in the time at their disposal. None the less, 
the attack on such a position was a serious under- 
taking, particularly as the enemy, knowing that it 
covered the direct road to Maubeuge, had occupied 
it in great strength and had numerous machine- 
guns and a powerful artillery. 

The battle of the Selle began in the early hours 
of October 17 with an attack by Debeney's First 

200 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



French Army and the 9th, 2nd American and 13th 
Corps of the Fourth British Army against the Ger- 
man left, from Le Cateau southwards. The enemy 
fought well, the 27th and 30th American Divisions 
having a particularly hard task in their attack upon 
the railway line south of Le Cateau, where it ran 
along a commanding hill. It was only after two 
days of strenuous effort that the Germans south of 
Le Cateau were forced back behind the Sambre and 
Oise Canal. It was quite evident from this fighting 
that the enemy was making a desperate effort to 
hold up our advance. Appeals were issued to the 
German troops to remember the devastation, which 
they had seen in Belgium and northern France, and 
to save their country from a like fate. But, though 
they fought valiantly, they had lost confidence both 
in themselves and in their leaders, and they had none 
of the grit and staying power which distinguished the 
British soldier when he was in like straits. However, 
it still remained to tackle the German main position 
along the Selle west of Le Cateau, and this was done 
in a night attack by seven divisions of the Third 
Army and one of the First Army. A mist in 
the valley increased the cover afforded by night, 
and enabled the infantry and engineers to lay foot 
bridges across the Selle under the very noses of the 
enemy's machine-gunners, and tanks to be brought 
down unseen into the valley. At 2 a.m. on Octo- 
ber 20 the British infantry advanced to the assault, 
and, helped by the ubiquitous tanks, which succeeded 

201 



The Last Four Months 



somehow in getting across the river, they stormed 
the heights on the east bank after fierce fighting, 
for the Germans again fought hard. 

The weather had broken, the ground was satu- 
rated, there was Httle shelter for the troops, the roads 
churned up by shell-fire and by the stream of traffic 
became rivers of mud, and both roads and railways 
were constantly being cut by mines, which the enemy 
had buried beneath them and fitted with delay action 
fuses, so that they would explode at irregular inter- 
vals after our troops had passed beyond, but the en- 
thusiasm of the British troops was not to be denied. 
On October 23 the Fourth, Third and First Armies 
made a general advance on a front of fifteen miles 
between the Sambre and Oise Canal and the Scheldt. 
On the right the Germans were driven back into the 
Mormal Forest, in the centre our troops got within 
a mile of Le Quesnoy, and on the left approached 
Valenciennes. Thus, in the battle of the Selle, 
British, French and American troops had made a 
breach, about thirty-five miles wide and nearly six 
miles deep, in Ludendorff's rallying line. The 
twenty-four British and two American divisions 
engaged had defeated thirty-one German divisions 
and had captured 20,000 prisoners and 475 guns. 

I have mentioned that on October 14 the Ameri- 
cans were in touch with the forward positions of the 
Kriemhilde system. On that day there began an 
eight-day battle on the front from the Meuse to 
Grandpre, in which by incessant hard fighting the 

203 



Ludendorff Tries to Rally 



Americans broke into the formidable German de- 
fenses at a number of points. On October 16 Grand- 
pre was taken, while Gouraud on the American left 
stormed the heights about Vouziers and crossed the 
Aisne. On the 16th, 17th and 18th a successsion of 
fierce attacks, in which four divisions took part, 
enabled the Americans to pierce the Kriemhilde line 
near its centre. The Germans fought desperately to 
hold the line and employed some of their best troops, 
including the 3rd Guard Division, the infantry of 
which was almost annihilated. The most important 
result of this battle was to exhaust the German 
defensive power on the Meuse front just as Haig's 
attacks had exhausted it on the Cambrai-St. Quentin 
front, a secondary result being to straighten out the 
American line, so that by the end of the month it 
was well placed for another general forward move- 
ment. I have already explained that Ludendorff's 
plan of deliberate withdrawal to the Meuse de- 
pended on holding off the British on the Selle and 
the Americans on the Kriemhilde line. He was 
endeavouring to assure his Government that there 
was no cause for despair when the news of the Selle 
battle and of the American attacks on the Kriem- 
hilde line reached them. It convinced them that 
there was no line upon which the German army 
could be relied upon to stand, and it shattered what 
little faith they had left in their military adviser. 
On October 26 Ludendorff tendered his resignation, 
which was accepted, and the next day he left Gi'eat 

203 



The Last Four Months 



Headquarters. The capitulation of Turkey, follow- 
ing upon that of Bulgaria, and the decisive defeat 
of the Austrians on the Piave, coupled with the 
never-ending tale of disaster on the Western Front, 
and the growing unrest in Germany left no glimmer 
of hope in the minds of the Kaiser and his ministers. 
While they were preparing to send in plenipoten- 
tiaries to Foch, he, in order to make assurance doubly 
sure, was setting the stage for the final advance. 



204 



CHAPTER VI 

The Last Push 

The American Advance to Sedan — Gouraud Reaches 
Mezieres — The British Enter Mauheuge and Mons 
— The Condition of the German Army — Was the 
Armistice Premature? 

At the end of October Germany's armies on the 
Western Front had suffered a series of crushing de- 
feats, her navy was seething with mutiny, her work- 
ing class population were on the verge of starvation, 
the German people were at last aware of the extent 
to which they had been deceived by their rulers. 
All of her allies had collapsed. The military power 
of the United States was but half developed, 
the output of the Allied munition factories had not 
reached its zenith. After a long and bitter struggle 
we had won a definite superiority in the air, we had 
aeroplanes ready of a type capable of bombing every 
town in Germany, and the U-boat menace had been 
scotched, if not definitely mastered. There could 
be only one end to the war ; the question was when 
that end would come. The situation of France in 
1870 after the battle of Sedan had been, except as 
regards food stocks, and the determination of the 
people to resist, more hopeless than was that of 

^05 



The Last Four Months 



Germany on October 30, 1918. Almost the entire 
French army as it had existed at the outbreak of 
the war had disappeared, and France, too, had 
reahsed that she had been deceived by those she had 
placed in authority over her. She overthrew the 
Government; under the inspiration of Gambetta's 
leadership she created new armies and went on fight- 
ing for six months, during which she caused her 
apparently irresistible foe many moments of anxiety. 
Germany had no need to create new armies. Those 
she had in the field were still capable of prolonged 
resistance, provided they were inspired with patriotic 
devotion and determined not to yield until the last 
extremity. Her enemies were still far from her 
frontiers, there were many strong natural barriers 
between the Allied armies and the interior of Ger- 
many, and the German armies, if permitted to fall 
back to these, would obtain a shorter and stronger 
battle front on which they might hold out throughout 
the winter. There was no precedent for a great and 
powerful nation, which was fighting for its existence, 
surrendering while it still had the means to resist. 
Therefore, it was necessary to continue to press the 
enemy until his means of resistance were destroyed 
or until his will to fight was finally broken. Foch 
therefore planned another great combined drive 
against him. 

When Germany in 1914 first invaded Belgium 
and France by far the greater number of the German 
troops deployed on the Western Front had crossed the 



The Last Push 



line extending from the Dutch frontier north of 
Liege to Metz, a distance of 115 miles. As the war 
went on and Germany developed her man power, her 
forces on the Western Front had been strengthened, 
and in the early months of 1918 they received a very 
great reinforcement consequent on the collapse of 
Russia. In August, 1914, some fifty-four German 
infantry divisions had passed between the Dutch 
frontier and Metz, and by the middle of 1918 the 
front of deployment of 115 miles had developed into 
a battle front extending from the North Sea near 
Nieuport to Pont-a-Mousson on the Moselle south 
of Metz, a great arc with a circumference of about 
350 miles. The maximum strength of the German 
armies on and behind the circumference of this arc 
amounted in May, 1918, to about 190 divisions. 
These divisions were smaller than those of August, 
1914, but their appurtenances, guns, mortars, 
machine-guns, aeroplanes and war material of all 
kinds had in the four years multiplied exceedingly. 
Even when Ludendorff had completed his retreat ywjb^ 
after the great battle of September 26-October 3, 
his front from the Dutch frontier to the neighbour- 
hood of Metz was not less than 250 miles in length, 
and the number of divisions which he had on that 
front and in reserve was not fewer than 160. 

Therefore, in order to make good their retreat 
the Germans had to get back across the 115 miles 
about three times as many men and many times as 
much material as Moltke had sent westwards across 

^07 



The Last Four Months 



that line in August, 1914. In fact, they had to get 
their armies through the neck of a bottle. It was 
like trying to force an oak plant, which has grown in 
four years from an acorn in a bottle of water, back 
into the bottle without destroying the plant ; a dijffi- 
cult problem if the neck of the bottle were clear, but 
it was not. Behind the German centre lay the for- 
ests and mountains of the Belgian and Luxembourg 
Ardennes, a region traversed by few roads and fewer 
railways, and washed by the Meuse, which had a 
limited number of bridges. The main exits lay north 
and south of the Ardennes, in the north from Liege 
to Namur, in the south from Mezieres to Longuyon. 
The course of the Meuse from Mezieres to Namur 
runs generally northwards, but at Namur, where 
the Sambre joins it, it makes a sharp bend eastwards. 
The consequence of this was that the German troops 
on the Scheldt on either side of Ghent would, when 
in their retreat they reached the longitude of Na- 
mur, still have fifty miles to march to the river 
and would only find east of Namur four points of 
passage. If the British succeeded in crossing the 
Meuse between Namur and Dinant before the Ger- 
man forces in Belgium had got over the river, there 
was a probability that they would be driven against 
the Dutch frontier and forced to surrender; if the 
German centre had not made good its retreat be- 
fore Gouraud and the Americans captured Mezieres 
and Sedan it was in danger of being cut off. There 
was, therefore, no longer any question of the lei- 

^03 



The Last Push 



surely retreat to the Meuse which Ludendorff had 
planned. It was essential to withdraw to the river 
as quickly as possible, but to do this without incur- 
ring irremediable disaster it was still as necessary 
as it had been since the end of September to delay 
to the utmost the British advance on Namur and the 
American progress towards Sedan. 

This was the position of which Foch proposed to 
take advantage by continuing the general plan of his 
great battle. Gouraud and the Americans were to 
strike for Mezieres and Sedan and block the south- 
ern exits, while the British armies made for Mau- 
beuge and Mons and threatened Namur before the 
Germans in western Belgium could get away. The 
advance on Namur would force the Germans to 
come out of the greater part of Belgium in a hurry 
or be cut off, and would save that sorely tried land 
from the destruction which was inevitable if it be- 
came the scene of pitched battles, while the advance 
on Mezieres and Sedan would have the same effect 
on the German centre. The French armies in 
the centre were, therefore, to continue their role of 
harassing and delaying the German retreat, and the 
Belgian armies were to keep the Germans busy on 
the Scheldt. The French troops on King Albert's 
right, however, with the help of two American divi- 
sions sent up to reinforce them, were to assist the 
British advance by forcing the line of the Scheldt 
about Audenarde. 

On November 1 the last drive began, as had 
209 



The Last Four Months 



Armageddon, with a Franco-American attack, and 
again there lay in front of the American left a stretch 
of mountain forest, the Forest of Bourgogne, a 
northern extension of the Argonne. Again the in- 
tention was to force the Germans out of the forest 
by a combined advance of the Americans to the 
east of it, and of Gouraud's army to the west. This 
time the plan was completely successful. On the 
right of the American battle front the 3rd American 
Corps attacked in the Meuse valley, while the 5th 
American Corps broke clean through such parts of 
the Kriemhilde line as it had not previously cap- 
tured, and made an advance of about five miles in 
the one day. Simultaneously Gouraud extended 
his hold on the heights on the eastern bank of the 
Aisne opposite Vouziers. The Germans were in no 
mind for a repetition of the Argonne struggle. Be- 
fore the battle started their morale had begun to give 
way under the steady pressure of the American ad- 
vance, and now it gave way altogether, while the 
American divisions which had done most of the 
hard fighting in October had either been rested and 
their ranks refilled, or had been relieved by fresh 
divisions, with the result that the First American 
Army was as full of vigour and energy as it had been 
on September 26, despite the continuously wet and 
cold weather on the bleak hills of the Meuse. 

On November 2 the 1st American Corps on the 
left of the First Army drove forward six miles, cap- 
tured Buzancy, and lined the eastern edge of the 

210 



The Last Push 



Bourgogne Forest, Gouraud at the same time reach- 
ing its western edge throughout its length. The 
Germans immediately evacuated the forest and 
began a general retreat before the First American 
Army and Gouraud's right. During the night of 
November 3 the infantry of the 2nd American Divi- 
sion, giving the weary Germans no time to reor- 
ganise a defense, made a remarkable pursuit and 
advanced in the darkness straight through the 
German lines for a distance of five miles. This 
great progress enabled the Americans to bring for- 
ward long-range guns and to shell the railway sta- 
tions of Longuyon and Montmedy, through which 
the Crown Prince was trying to get away as much 
as possible of his war material. 

The clearing of the Bourgogne Forest had enabled 
Gouraud to join hands with the Americans on 
November 3 to the north of the forest, and he thus 
obtained a straight front of some nine miles beyond 
the Aisne east of Attigny. He was now able to 
threaten the retreat of the German troops holding 
the formidable Brunehilde line further west between 
Attigny and Rethel, by pushing forward his right wing 
in conjunction with the American advance. On No- 
vember 4 he drove the enemy back from the southern 
portion of the canal which connects the Aisne near 
Attigny with the Meuse near Sedan. This manoeuvre 
compelled the Germans to fall back from the Brune- 
hilde line in order to avoid being cut off from Mez- 
ieres, and the French entered Rethel on November 6. 

211 



The Last Four Months 



Meanwhile, by November 5 the American front 
had sprung forward another six miles, and on the 
evening of the 6th, despite the endeavours of the 
German machine-gunners to delay the pursuit, a 
division of the 1st American Corps reached the 
Meuse opposite the southern outskirts of Sedan, 
twenty-one mUes from its starting point of Novem- 
ber 1. Gouraud, with a longer distance to go and 
with the resistance of the German troops, who 
had fallen back from the Brunehilde line, to over- 
come, did not reach his objective, Mezieres, until 
the evening of the tenth. While the 1st and 5th 
American Corps were advancing northwards towards 
Sedan the right of the 3rd Corps began to strike 
out eastwards, and it crossed the Meuse and occu- 
pied Dun on November 4. Thence on the fol- 
lowing days, the 3rd, 2nd Colonial and 17th French 
Corps on the right of the First American Army 
gradually wore down the resistance of the Germans 
in the wooded Meuse hills, and on the morning of 
November 11, when the armistice came into effect, 
the Franco-American front was within six miles of 
Montmedy, where the German Crown Prince had 
lived during the battle of Verdun, when he was not 
in his dug-out on the Montfaucon Hill. Though 
Montmedy was not entered by the Allies until the 
Germans had withdrawn in accordance with the 
armistice terms, they found on arrival that defeat 
had not changed the German nature, for the little 
town was pillaged by the enemy's troops before they 
'" 212 



The Last Push 



left. These operations on the east bank of the 
Meuse towards Montmedy were extended south- 
wards by the Second American Army, which began 
the long threatened movement toward the Briey 
iron fields. The reasons for this development I 
must leave for the present to follow events farther 
north. 

While the French and Americans on the southern 
battle front were completing the task set them by 
Foch, the British armies were again in motion. The 
Germans at the end of October, after their defeat 
on the Selle, occupied the line of the Scheldt from 
Ghent to a point about two miles south of Valen- 
ciennes, whence their front ran southwards to the 
river Sambre, which it reached a little above 
Landrecies. The distance between the Scheldt 
and the Sambre on this line was not more than 
eighteen miles, and the southern five of these eight- 
een miles were taken up by the Mormal Forest. 
Sir Douglas Haig's first care was, therefore, to get 
more room for his advance between the Sambre 
and the Scheldt, and particularly to force the enemy 
to fall back from the tangle of reclaimed land, cut 
up by innumerable dykes, which stretches north 
of Valenciennes as far as the Conde Canal. Ac- 
cordingly, on November 1, while the Americans 
and French were attacking on the Meuse-Argonne 
front, the 17th Corps of the Third British Army, 
and 22nd and Canadian Corps of the First Army, 
attacked south of Valenciennes, and after two days' 

213 



The Last Four Months 



heavy fighting had by the evening of November 2 
turned the Hne of the Scheldt from the south, and 
the Canadian Corps had entered Valenciennes. 
This at once gave Haig the elbow room he required, 
and as there was no time to spare, if the enemy 
were to be prevented from making good his re- 
treat to the Meuse, the Fourth, Third and First 
Armies attacked on November 4 on a thirty-mile 
front, from the Sambre Canal eight miles south 
of the Mormal Forest to the north of Valen- 
ciennes. The British right had the difficult tasks of 
crossing the Sambre Canal, which is as wide as the 
Scheldt Canal stormed on September 29, and con- 
tained more water, and of forcing a way through 
the Mormal Forest. This forest was not so serious 
an obstacle as it had been in August, 1914, when 
after the battle of Mons it caused the separation of 
the British army into two parts, one retreating on 
each side of it, for the Germans had obtained a 
great quantity of timber from it for their trenches, 
huts and dug-outs, and they had also improved 
the roads through it. Nevertheless, it afforded a 
resolute enemy splendid opportunities for defense, 
and both it and the canal prevented the Fourth 
Army from making free use of its tanks. 

The British army was now fighting on the very 
ground on which it had first assembled in France, 
before it advanced to Mons, and was about to take 
complete revenge for its early misfortunes. After 
an intense bombardment, a dense artillery barrage 

214 



The Last Push 



rolled forward, and behind it, with the help of tanks 
wherever they could be used, the infantry on the 
whole thirty miles broke into the German positions. 
On the right the 1st and 32nd Divisions fought their 
way across the canal, and by nightfall were more 
than three miles to the east of it. Farther north 
the Germans were driven far back into the Mormal 
Forest, and troops of the 25th Division, crossing 
the Sambre on rafts, captured Landrecies at the 
southeast corner of the forest. Landrecies was 
defended by a battalion of the German 1st Guard 
Reserve Division ; it was in Landrecies that British 
Guards first met the Germans, when on August 25, 
1914, they repulsed a night attack in the streets 
of the town. North of the Mormal Forest the 37th 
Division and the New Zealanders, after repulsing 
a heavy German counter-attack, drove the enemy 
back beyond the Valenciennes-Avesnes railway, 
which runs through the centre of the forest from 
west to east, and the New Zealanders, surrounding 
the old fortified town of Le Quesnoy, compelled its 
garrison to surrender. By the evening the left of 
the Third Army, and the right of the First Army, 
were on a front five miles beyond Valenciennes. 
On the British right Debeney's First French Army 
had also forced a crossing over the Sambre Canal 
to the north of Guise and kept pace with the advance 
of our Fourth Army. In this battle the resistance 
of the enemy was definitely broken and he never 
rallied again. The three British armies captured 

215 



The Last Four Months 



19,000 prisoners and 450 guns, and Debeney gathered 
in 5,000 more prisoners. South of Ghent the two 
French corps on Kjng Albert's right, each of which 
now had an American division with them, drove 
back the Germans along the Scheldt, and the 91st 
American Division captured Audenarde. 

From this time until the end the pursuit was 
delayed mainly by the very complete destruction of 
the roads and railways by the Germans as they fell 
back, and by the consequent difficulty of getting up 
supplies to the troops. The enemy's difficulties in 
retreat were, however, much greater. Far into 
Belgium the roads were blocked with masses of 
transport and the railways with thousands of trucks, 
for the removal of which the Germans had not 
sufficient engines. Our aeroplanes, swooping down 
from the sky, attacked the German convoys and 
railway lines with machine-gun fire and with bombs, 
causing great destruction and frequent panics. A 
single battalion of the 25th Division on November 5 
captured thirty guns, which the German artillery- 
men had abandoned when attacked from the air. 
By November 5 our troops were well beyond the 
Mormal Forest. On the 7th the Guards entered 
BavaijOn the 8th the Fourth Army occupied Avesnes. 
On the 9th the Guards and 62nd Division occupied 
the fortress of Maubeuge, the French taking Hirson 
on the same day. On the 8th the Germans began to 
fly from the Scheldt, and the British Fifth and 
Second Armies, with the French and Americans on 

216 



The Last Push 



their left, who had been preparing to deliver a great 
attack on the river line on November 11, finding 
that the enemy was slipping away, followed hard 
after him and made rapid progress. Peruwelz, 
Tournai and Renaix were occupied in succession, 
while by a last dramatic stroke of fortune the 3rd 
Canadian Division entered Mons a few hours before 
the Armistice was signed. There were many curious 
coincidences between our first and last contact with 
the Germans in arms. OflBcers of our Cavalry who 
had fought at Mons in 1914 found themselves on 
November 11, 1918, on the scene of their original 
encounter with the German troopers, while most 
curious of all, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Irish 
Regiment, which had fought in the 3rd Division in 
the loop of the canal northeast of Mons on August 
23, 1914, was with the 63rd Division cutting that 
loop when hostilities ceased. 

The opinion is widely held that the Armistice of 
November 11 was premature. It is argued that we 
had the German armies at our mercy, and that 
the foimdations of peace would have been more 
sure if we had ended the war by forcing the surrender 
in the field of a great part of those armies, or, failing 
that, had driven our beaten enemy back across the 
Rhine and followed him into the heart of Germany. 
The reception of the German troops by the German 
people, their march into the German towns through 
triumphal arches and beflagged streets with their 
helmets crowned with laurels, and the insistent state- 

217 



The Last Four Months 



ments in Germany that the German armies had not 
been defeated, that the Armistice had been accepted 
to save bloodshed, and to put an end to the sufferings 
of the women and children aroused amazement and 
disgust in the victors. There was very real anxiety 
lest after all we had failed to convince Germany 
that war did not pay ; it was felt that we ought to 
have brought the realisation of what war means 
home to the German people in their own country, 
and that, had we done so, the long-drawn-out 
negotiations in Paris would have been concluded 
more speedily and more satisfactorily. It is worth 
while, therefore, examining the situation as it was 
at the time of the Armistice, and considering 
the case as it presented itself to the men who 
had to decide whether hostilities should cease or 
not. 

There is no question but that the German armies 
were completely and decisively beaten in the field. 
The German plenipotentiaries admitted it when 
they met Marshal Foch, and von Brockdorff- 
Rantzau admitted it at Versailles, when he said 
after the Allied peace terms had been presented to 
him: "We are under no illusions as to the extent 
of our defeat and the degree of our want of power. 
. . . We know that the power of the German 
army is broken." 

Even if these admissions had not been made, the 
condition of the German lines of retreat to the Rhine 
is conclusive evidence of the condition of their armies. 

218 



The Last Push 



Every road was littered with broken-down motor- 
trucks, guns, machine-guns and trench mortars. 
Great stacks of supplies and of military stores of 
all kinds were abandoned. Every railway line was 
blocked with loaded trucks which the Germans had 
been unable to remove. The sixty miles of railway 
in the valley of the Meuse between Dinant and 
Mezieres was filled from end to end with a con- 
tinuous line of German freight trains carrying 
guns, ammunition, engineering equipment, and 
other paraphernalia. On the Belgian canals alone 
over eight hundred fully charged military barges 
were found. It is beyond dispute that on Novem- 
ber 11 the lines of communication immediately 
behind the German armies had been thrown into 
complete disorder by the streams of traffic which 
were converging on the Meuse bridges, disorder 
greatly intensified by the attacks of the Allied air- 
men. The German armies, unable to resist on the 
fighting front, could no longer retreat in good order, 
partly because of the congestion on the roads and 
railways behind them, which not only hampered 
the movements of the troops, but prevented the 
systematic supply to them of food and ammunition, 
partly owing to the fact that there were not horses 
left to draw the transport of the fighting troops. 
The following description of the condition of the 
German Army at the time when it began its march 
back to the Rhine in accordance with the Armistice 
terms has been recently published in Berlin : 

219 



The Last Four Months 



Many of the units of the army were unable to move for 
lack of transport horses. Even those which were able 
to march had but little of their former mobility because 
the loss of horses had been so great. The majority of the 
troops were unaccustomed to long marches, the horses 
were in very poor condition, and the daily losses even 
during the retreat to the Antwerp-Meuse position had 
been very great. There was a deficiency of boots, winter 
clothing, hoof-pads, and frost nails, and winter weather 
might set in at any time. Almost all the casualty clear- 
ing stations, the ambulances and the hospitals were over- 
crowded owing to the continuous stream of wounded and 
sick, which poured in in consequence of the fighting which 
continued right up to the Armistice.^ 

Not less remarkable is a report from the head- 
quarters of one of the divisions of the 17th German 
Army of the Crown Prince Rupprecht's group. The 
number of the division is obliterated on the report, 
which is dated November 8, 1918, and was found 
in a Belgian farmhouse. I have therefore been 
unable to identify the division, but it appears to 
have been one of those which was opposed to our 
First Army. The report runs: "The division can 
only be considered as unfit for battle. Owing to 
the extremely heavy casualties, to sickness and to 
numerous desertions, the average strength of regi- 

%J ments ^ is under 600. Still more important as re- 

gards eflficiency in battle is the shortage of oflBcers, 

^' of which no regiment of the division has more than 

u. g^ . ^Die Riichfuhrung des Westheeres, Berlin, 1919. 

2 A German regiment consisted of three battalions and its full 
strength was about 3000 men and 64 oflficers. 

220 



The Last Push 



twelve, and one regiment has only nine. Almost 
all the machine-guns in the division have been lost 
or are out of repair, and half the guns of the artillery 
are deficient. Owing to lack of horses, less than 
half the transport of the division can be moved, and 
if the retreat continues, many guns and vehicles 
will have to be abandoned. Owing to lack of petrol, 
much of the motor transport of the division cannot 
be moved. The division has not received rations 
for two days, and the condition of the horses which 
remain is becoming very bad, because owing to 
constant movement there is no time to collect sup- 
plies from the country, and forage for them is not 
arriving." 

If ever armies were in a state of hopeless rout, 
the German armies were in the second week of 
November, 1918. The morale of the troops was 
gone, the organisation of the services on which they 
depended for their needs had collapsed. This being 
so, why did we allow the German armies to escape 
from a hopeless position ? Why did we not at once 
follow up the military advantage which we had 
gained at such cost ? 

In order to get an answer to these questions I 
visited the fronts of the Allied armies shortly after 
the conclusion of the Armistice. I there found, 
after travelling down the line from north to south, 
that amongst the fighting troops of the Belgian, 
British, French and American armies the opinion 
was unanimous that they had got the Germans on 

221 



14;.<«,C 



The Last Four Months 



the run and could have kept them on the run in- 
definitely, or until they laid down their arms. On 
the American front in particular, where there were 
large numbers of troops ready and eager to go forward 
who had not yet taken part in a great battle, there 
was a very strong feeling that they had been robbed 
of the fruits of victory. When, however, I inquired 
the opinion of those behind the fighting fronts who 
were responsible for feeding the troops and keeping 
them supplied with all that was necessary to enable 
them to march forward, I heard a different story. 
Everywhere I was told that the Allied armies, which 
were on or were marching towards the Meuse, had 
on November 11 reached, or very nearly reached, 
the farthest limit at which for the time being they 
could be kept regularly supplied. The reasons for 
this were twofold. In the first place the Allied 
lines of communication grew steadily longer as the 
Germans were driven back, and even before our 
victorious advance began the state of the railways 
and the amount of rolling stock in France had caused 
anxiety. For four and a half years the railway 
systems of Northeastern France had been strained 
to the limit of their capacity, and the effects of that 
strain were beginning to be serious in 1918. Both 
we and the Americans had made great efforts to 
improve and extend the railway systems in our 
respective zones. During 1918 the British military 
railway administration in France built or recon- 
structed 2340 miles of broad-gauge and 1348 miles 



The Last Push 



of narrow-gauge railways, while to supplement the 
French rolling stock we sent to France 1200 loco- 
motives and 52,600 cars. The shipment across the 
Channel of such cumbrous and heavy objects as 
locomotives and trucks was a slow and difficult 
business, and the needs of the armies were always 
growing faster than were the resources of the railways. 
During the last four months of the war the weekly 
average load carried by the British military railways 
in France amounted to over half a million tons. 

If these were our difficulties, those of the Ameri- 
can army were greater, owing to the rapid growth 
of the army during the latter half of the year 1918, 
the shortage of shipping capable of crossing the 
Atlantic, and the necessity of giving first place to 
the transportation of troops and of war material. 
Up to the end the railways under American control 
in France suffered from a deficiency in rolling stock, 
and had great difficulty in meeting the demands of 
the large forces engaged in the Meuse-Argonne 
battle at the end of an ever-lengthening line of com- 
munications. The French armies, which in the 
middle of September had been extended along the 
outside of the great bow made by the German lines 
between St. Quentin and Verdun, had the longest 
distances to advance in following up the German 
retreat, and before the advance began the French 
Government had cut down the railway transporta- 
tion in the interior of the country to the bare min- 
imum necessary for the preservation of the industrial 

223 



The Last Four Months 



and social life of France, and even then was unable 
to meet the full demands of the French armies and 
to supplement the railway material which Great 
Britain and America had been able to produce. The 
Belgian armies had hardly any resources of their 
own and no means whatever of developing their 
means of transportation. The result of all this 
was that the mere lengthening of the Allied lines 
of communications by the German retreat, apart 
altogether from any other action by the enemy, threw 
a very great strain upon the Allied railway adminis- 
trations. 

The Germans were, however, very active and 
skilful in damaging the roads and railways before 
they retreated, and this damage was extended by 
the destructive power of the artillery of both sides. 
Every railway bridge, large or small, was blown up, 
the railway embankments were cut, long stretches 
of track were destroyed, the stations were burned 
down, and the telegraph lines were almost obliterated 
and the instruments removed. The Germans had 
left behind them mines buried under the railway 
lines, and these exploded often after the j&rst damage 
had been repaired and the trains were running, with 
the result that there was constant interruption to 
the traffic. One of our Army Commanders told me 
that, owing to the constant explosion of mines be- 
hind his front, during the last stages of the advance 
of his army his railhead was retreating faster than 
his troops were advancing. The consequence of 



The Last Push 



this was that on November 11, despite the most 
strenuous and devoted work by all concerned in 
the repair and working of the railways, the farthest 
points at which supplies could be delivered by rail 
were from thirty-five to fifty miles in a direct line 
behind the front, and often double this distance by 
road. This gap had to be bridged by the motor 
transport, which, of course, had to use the roads. 
But the destruction of the roads by the Germans 
was as thorough as their destruction of the railways. 
Not only were the bridges destroyed, but mines 
were sprung at every cross-road. I remember 
counting eleven mine craters on three miles of the 
main road between Le Quesnoy and Mons. This 
damage could only be very roughly repaired, while 
the wet weather and the heavy trafl&c of the German 
retreat and of our advance increased the work of 
destruction. The heavy motor lorries, loaded with 
supplies and ammunition, had to plough their way 
slowly through these broken roads from the rail- 
heads to the troops, and return to the railheads to 
fill up. At the time of the Armistice the motor 
lorries were working in double and treble shifts, 
and the strain upon them caused by the bad roads 
and the incessant work was such that in the Fourth 
Army on November 11 more than half of the lorries 
at the service of the army had broken down. The 
troops were receiving no more than bare necessities, 
and at one time had with them nothing more than 
the day's food carried by the men. 

225 



The Last Four Months 



The advance of the British army towards Ger- 
many did not begin until November 17, six days 
after all fighting had ceased, and actually only six- 
teen of the fifty-nine British infantry divisions in 
France and Belgium at the time of the Armistice — 
that is, less than one-third of our whole army — 
moved forward. Though there was no interference 
by the enemy, and the advance was made by slow 
stages, it proved impossible to keep even this com- 
paratively small part of our army supplied with 
their full rations, and at the beginning of December 
it was necessary to call a halt because the supply 
trains were running more than forty-eight hours 
behind scheduled time. A very similar story could 
be told of the situation on the Belgian, French, and 
American fronts. 

Nor was the feeding of the fighting troops by any 
means the only problem of supply which the Allied 
armies had to solve. The Germans in their retreat 
had left behind them in the liberated provinces of 
France and Belgium a large civilian population on 
the verge of starvation. In the French provinces on 
the British front alone there were nearly 800,000 
persons to be fed, and during a period of six weeks, 
until the French Government could undertake the 
distribution of supplies, we distributed more than 
5,000,000 rations amongst the civilian population, a 
task which threw an immense additional burden 
upon the transportation services. The French 
armies on their own front had very much larger 

226 



The Last Push 



numbers to deal with, and, as it taxed all their 
resources to repair the main roads and railways so 
that the troops on the front might be fed, many 
French villages and small towns off the main lines 
of communication remained isolated for long periods, 
and were only kept from starvation by having food 
brought to them by aeroplanes. Added to all this, 
the Germans, as they retreated, released large num- 
bers of prisoners of war without making any pro- 
vision for their feeding. The people of Belgium 
of their necessities made great sacrifices in order to 
do what was possible for these unfortunate men, 
whose sufferings were often intense, but their means 
were not equal to their generosity, and yet another 
burden was added to the work of supply. 

This being the situation on the front at the time 
when the Armistice was signed and during the days 
which followed its signature, it is obvious that a great 
and rapid advance to and across the Meuse by the 
Belgian, British, French, and American armies, such 
as might have brought about the complete destruc- 
tion of the German armies and ended the war with 
a colossal Sedan, was out of the question. It is true 
that on November 11 two British cavalry divisions 
had passed through the front and were ready to 
pursue the enemy. Sir Douglas Haig has expressed 
the opinion that this cavalry would have been able 
to turn the retreat of the Germans on the British 
front into a complete rout, but it is very improbable 
that any action by such a comparatively small force 

227 



The Last Four Months 



of mounted troops would have been able to affect 
seriously the situation on the whole long front, and 
their influence, though it would certainly have been 
considerable, must necessarily have been local. The 
plain fact is that on, or very soon after, November 11 
it would, had hostilities been continued, have been 
necessary to call a halt of the Allied armies between 
the Dutch frontier and the Meuse until the roads and 
railways behind them had been repaired and the 
services of supply were again able to work normally. 
That is to say, it would have been necessary to give 
the enemy a breathing space, which would have 
allowed him to restore some sort of order in his ranks 
and make good his retreat to the Meuse, where he 
would have been able to establish himself on a very 
much shorter front and in very strong posi- 
tions. This would have entailed fighting at least 
one more great battle and have cost us very many 
lives. 

There was, however, a part of the front on which 
the Allied armies had made little progress and behind 
which their communications were in good order ; that 
was the front between the Meuse, northeast of Ver- 
dun, and the Swiss frontier. As I have explained, 
Pershing's victory of the St. Mihiel salient had given 
Foch an opportunity for invading Lorraine, and the 
French Marshal had all his plans ready for the exten- 
sion of his long line of battle by an advance into 
Lorraine when hostilities ceased. In fact, the 
manoeuvres preliminary to this advance had begun 

228 



The Last Push 



on November 7, when the three French corps imme- 
diately east of the Meuse attacked in the direction 
of Montmedy , a movement followed by the advance 
of the Second American Army through the Woevre, 
as the country east of the St. Mihiel salient is called, 
towards the famous iron fields of Briey. The left of 
the Second American Army had driven the Germans 
back some three miles in the Woevre by the morning 
of November 11. The general plan for this new 
attack was that the left of the Second American 
Army should be protected by the advance of the 
right of the First American Army and of the three 
French corps on Longwy — the French fort on the 
Luxembourg frontier, about fifteen miles north of 
Briey, which had been captured in 1914 by the 
German Crown Prince in the first invasion of France 
— the Second American Army was to attack towards 
and across the Briey iron fields, which lie north of 
Metz, while another Franco- American attack was 
to be made east of the Moselle and to the south of 
Metz. These two attacks, which were to have been 
in full swing by November 14, were intended to 
isolate the great German fortress. Now there is very 
little doubt but that this battle on the Lorraine front 
would have ended in another great Allied victory, 
for the Germans would have been greatly out- 
numbered and their troops on this part of the line 
were not of the best quality ; but it is equally certain 
that it would have exposed a great part of Lorraine 
to the ravages of war, and very probably also to the 

229 



The Last Four Months 



same widespread destruction which the Germans had 
carried out during their retreat farther north. 

The general situation at the time of the Armistice, 
then, was that the AUied armies between the Dutch 
frontier and the Meuse were for the time being 
incapable of carrying on a sustained advance, though 
two British cavalry divisions were ready to begin a 
local pursuit on a portion of the British front. The 
Germans in front of them had been utterly defeated 
and were almost helpless, but we were not, and could 
not for some little time, be in a position to complete 
their destruction as a military force. It was, there- 
fore, reasonably certain that if the Armistice had 
been refused the Allied armies would have had to 
fight hard and would have suffered serious losses, 
while there was the risk of exposing the greater part 
of Belgium, including the cities of Brussels and 
Antwerp, and the great Charleroi industrial district 
— which were still in the hands of the Germans — to 
destruction. Everything was ready for another 
battle on the Lorraine front, but this too would 
certainly have cost us many lives and have caused 
much damage to valuable property, which is to-day 
intact and in the hands of the French. The problem 
which the Allied and Associated Governments and 
generals had to decide was whether they would 
continue to fight on these terms or would impose 
such conditions of Armistice upon the enemy as 
would render him militarily impotent. They de- 
cided on the latter course, and I think there are very 

230 



l^he Last Tush 



few who would have taken upon themselves the 
responsibility of deciding otherwise. 

The criticism of the decision to stop fighting on 
November 11 has been due to the feeling that the 
German people do not recognise that their armies 
were beaten in the field, and the fear that this state 
of mind may sooner or later cause them to fight 
again. My own conviction is that the reception 
of the German troops in Germany and the state- 
ments made in the German press and by the German 
people that the Armistice was not the consequence 
of defeat were not unnatural, and can be explained. 
In November, 1918, the German people could 
only get news of what was happening on the front 
through the newspapers, and the newspapers got 
their information through the military Press Bureau. 
The officials of that bureau, either because they were 
so inured to lying that they could not tell the truth, 
or in the hope of staving off revolution by continuing 
to deceive the people, announced, from the first days 
when things began to go wrong for them right up to 
the end, that German armies were fighting plen- 
didly, that the front was everywhere intact, and that 
the troops were falling back, slowly and steadily, 
according to plan, to better and stronger positions. 
No inkling was given of the true state of affairs on 
the front, and the German people ascribed the sur- 
render either to the revolution, if they were not in fa- 
vour of it, or more generally to the desire of the new 
Government to get the blockade raised as quickly 

231 



The Last Four Months 



as possible. When the German troops came back 
to their homes and began to talk, the truth gradually 
became known, and the German people were able to 
see for themselves the state of the army which had 
once been their god. I do not think that there is 
to-day any intelligent German who does not know 
that the German armies were utterly beaten, though 
there may be many who would not admit as much 
to a foreigner. 

It has begun to dawn upon most Germans that 
it is more disgraceful to admit that they accepted 
defeat, ignominiously surrendered their navy, gave 
up the greater part of their artillery and aeroplanes, 
handed over large quantities of rolling stock and 
military stores, and permitted the armies of their 
enemies to occupy the Rhine unopposed, that they 
did all this when they still had the power to fight on, 
than to acknowledge that their armies were defeated 
in the field. I do not believe that we shall in the 
future hear much more of the unbeaten German 
armies, except perhaps from a few extremists like 
Bernhardi, nor do I believe that if we had not stopped 
fighting on November 11 it would have been possible 
to make Germany any less capable of resistance 
than she is to-day. 

I set out in this book to describe the general 
course of the last great campaign on the Western 
Front. I am not, therefore, concerned with the story 
of the downfall of Bulgaria, Austria and Turkey, 
except in so far as these have contributed to the 

232 



The Last Push 



defeat of our chief enemy. The trials of the spring 
of 1918 had taught us that common sense which is 
the essence of strategy; we had learned that the 
Western Front was for us the vital front, and we had 
concentrated there every man who could be spared 
from other theatres of war, but Sir Charles Monro's 
expansion of the Indian army had enabled us to 
replace the British troops withdrawn from Palestine 
with Indian troops v/ho could not be employed in 
France. Thus Allenby was still powerful, while any 
weakening of the British and French forces in Mace- 
donia had been compensated by the addition of a 
Jugo-Slav division to the Serbian army and the 
growth of the Greek forces. The Germans had 
withdrawn all their troops in Italy to France, so that 
the Italians were not only able to dispense with part 
of the assistance which we and the French had given 
them after Caporetto, but were able to send a con- 
tingent to France, and even so were superior to the 
Austrian armies on their front. Therefore, common 
sense indicated that as soon as Foch's policy of ex- 
hausting the German reserves in the West had 
taken effect, and Germany was no longer in a posi- 
tion to help her friends, every possible effort should 
be made on every front. By that time it had be- 
come clear that the direct road to Germany was the 
shortest road, that the barrier in the West was 
penetrable, and therefore, while the attack upon 
our enemies upon all fronts became general, there 
was no doubt as to where the main attack was to be 

233 



The Last Four Months 



made or any attempt to seek the defeat of Germany 
by taking the way round. Had there been no good 
reason to expect that the AUied armies in France 
would be able to pierce the Hindenburg line, then, 
when the arrival of American troops had placed the 
safety of the Western Front beyond question, it 
might have been right to seek victory by the way 
round. Fortunately, this was not necessary, for it 
would have greatly prolonged the war. 

So it happened that, while Foch was complet- 
ing his preparations for Armageddon, Franchet 
d'Esperey was driving back the Bulgars, AUenby 
was overwhelming the Turks, and about a month 
later, on October 24, the Italians began the third 
battle of the Piave. By the time that Austria 
collapsed Ludendorff's attempt to rally had been 
defeated, and the fate of the German armies in the 
West was sealed. The Italian victory, therefore, 
came too late to affect the main issue, nor did 
AUenby's campaign, though of vital importance in 
its influence on the future of the East, hasten by 
an hour the defeat of Germany. The defeat of 
Bulgaria, on the other hand, did, as I have shown 
from the statements made by Hindenburg and his 
advisers at the time, unquestionably weigh with the 
political and military leaders of Germany and helped 
to convince them of the hopelessness of their position. 
The controversy between the advocates of an East- 
ern and of a Western policy, which so long agitated 
us, is a symptom of defective organisation. Conflict 

234 



The Last Push 



between the political demands for dispersal of force 
and the military demands for concentration are 
nothing new in war. It has always been a very 
difficult problem to adjust them, and in the case of 
a scattered Empire such as ours the problem is 
peculiarly complex. War, as the Germans were 
never tired of telling us, is an act of policy, and it 
is the business of the statesman to define policy in 
war as in peace. The soldier is as much his servant 
as the civilian administrator in Whitehall. It is the 
statesman's dutyto determine the objects of the war, 
to say what interests are vital to the security of the 
nation and what may be neglected with impunity, 
to increase our power by bringing in allies to our 
side, and to diminish that of the enemy by detaching 
from him potential or actual adherents to his cause. 
War, however, is not an abstract problem. It is a 
struggle against an opponent whose intentions and 
resources can only be surmised from incomplete 
evidence. Miscalculations and mistakes entail loss 
of life and, maybe, disaster. Therefore, before the 
statesman decides on his policy it must be translated 
for him by experts into a definite plan which shows 
him what his policy entails in men and in time, and 
gives him the best possible estimate of how the enemy 
will endeavour to counter the plan. It is very easy 
to take a map and place one million men in the 
Balkans, or a quarter of a million in the Gallipoli 
Peninsula, and picture the results of their action 
when they have arrived. It is quite another matter 

235 



The Last Four Months 



to calculate accurately how long it will take to get 
the men to those places, to estimate what will be 
needed to maintain them when they are there, and 
to forecast what the enemy may do while they are 
moving to their positions. 

Mr. Lloyd George's proposal, made early in 1915, 
to transfer the British army to the Balkans would 
have been admirable had it been practicable. He 
maintained, with good reason, that such a manoeuvre 
would assure the safety of Serbia, bring in Italy, 
Greece, Bulgaria and Roumania on our side, enable 
us to complete the encirclement of the Central 
Powers, cut them off from Turkey and the East, 
would open up communication with Russia, and 
allow us to attack Austria in overwhelming force. 
It opened up a dazzling prospect when compared with 
Kitchener's prophecy of a war lasting three years 
and with the slow and costly process of wearing down 
the Germans in the West. The fallacy in the plan 
was that we had not the military power ready to 
provide for security in the West and in the East 
while it was in preparation. It would have taken 
us many months to move an army to the Balkans 
and to equip it. While it was on the move it would 
have been incapable of action, and in the interval 
both the Western Front and Egypt would have been 
exposed to attack. Even if Germany weye unable to 
get the Turks to organise an effective attack upon 
Egypt and did not again mass troops against France, 
there was no guarantee that she would not anticipate 

236 



The Last Push 



us in the Balkans, as from her central position she 
might readily do, and with the help of Austria, 
Bulgaria and Turkey destroy our expedition while it 
was concentrating. The translation of Mr. Lloyd 
George's plan into practical proposals involved a 
careful survey of ways and means and elaborate 
calculation of time and space. These were the 
business of the soldier. But we had made the grave 
mistake of taking too narrow a view of our commit- 
ments when we first entered into the war. No one 
save Kitchener, who was only brought into the War 
OiEce after war had been declared, had foreseen that 
we would be engaged in a world war and a long war, 
and it took even Kitchener time to grasp that our 
part in such a war could only be directed from a great 
general headquarters in London. We allowed the 
General Staff at the War Office to be broken up, and 
it was long before it was built up again. The result 
of this was that the Government was deprived of 
expert assistance at the time when it was most 
needed, and individual Ministers devoted their 
energies, abilities and influence to advocating partic- 
ular plans of campaign which appealed to them, in 
place of supporting one carefully thought out and 
agreed policy. 

The Dardanelles Commission has made public 
the melancholy story of the inception of that en- 
terprise. As a plan of campaign it promised, if 
successful, results as brilliant as Mr. Lloyd George's 
Balkan enterprise, while it had the advantage 

237, . 



The Last Four Months 



over its rival that it enabled us to make use of our 
sea power for offense and that it did provide from 
the outset a definite measure of protection for 
Egypt, for it was clear that the Turks would not 
venture to attack the Suez Canal while Constanti- 
nople was menaced. The plan was faulty because 
Mr. Churchill had formed an exaggerated estimate 
of the power of naval guns against land defenses, 
because the machinery for getting the expert naval 
opinion before the Government on this question was 
defective, and because we were drawn into a mili- 
tary enterprise for which we had not the means 
ready, when it was found that the navy had been 
given an impossible task. Owing to this same 
absence of organised expert advice, the Mesopota- 
mian expedition was allowed to drift gradually 
into commitments which were beyond its powers. 
So our energies were exhausted in controversies 
which need not have arisen if the roles and responsi- 
bilities of the statesman, the soldier and the sailor 
had been clearly defined, and if the Government 
had been equipped with the means of surveying 
the whole ground from the outset, and of learning 
what various alternative policies entailed in men, 
guns, ships, material and time. In our special 
circumstances "side-shows" were inevitable. We 
had to protect India, and keep the Suez Canal 
open ; we could not allow the Germans a free hand 
in Africa to organise native forces at their leisure. 
We could not therefore concentrate all our forces in 

238 



The Last Push 



the Western theatre and leave the outlying parts of 
the Empire to look after themselves. The fact was, 
however, that so large a part of om* total power was 
required in order to make the Western Front safe 
that we were never able, until our enemies were on 
the verge of exhaustion, to conduct offensive cam- 
paigns elsewhere to a decisive issue. Because that 
truth was not realised in time, we frittered away our 
resources and prolonged the war. In the end circum- 
stances compelled us to renounce our strategical 
heresies, and victory followed. 

Not only was the defeat of the German armies 
due to Foch's campaign in the West, but that 
campaign made victory possible in all theatres of war 
by discouraging Germany's allies, who, like the 
German people, had been kept in the war by prom- 
ises of victory, and by depriving them of her aid 
at the moment when they were most in need of 
it. The sudden change of the tide of fortune from 
the ebb to the full flood of victory, the vast extent 
of the operations, and the swift succession of blows 
struck made this campaign a stupendous climax to 
a stupendous war. In 118 days the great German 
army which set out confidently to capture Paris on 
July 15, 1918, had been utterly and completely 
broken. It had been driven back to the French 
frontier, and made incapable of further resistance. 
During the period of rather less than four months 
which had elapsed since the beginning of the second 
battle of the Marne the British army had captured 

239 



Tt^jJC^ 



The Last Four Months 



188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns ; the French army, 
139,000 prisoners and 1,880 guns; the American 
army, 44,000 prisoners and 1,421 guns ; the Belgian 
army, 14,500 prisoners and 474 guns — a total of 
385,500 prisoners and 6,615 guns. Many thousands 
of machine guns and trench mortars and thousands 
of tons of war material of all kinds must be added 
to this tale of booty, while the enemy's losses in 
killed and wounded are estimated to have amounted 
to 1,500,000. 

This wonderful result, which even as late as the 
«ill.3t end of September no one would have ventured to 
'j^^g^ foretell, was due to many causes, of which, in the 
military sphere, three are predominant : the genius 
of Foch, the unexpectedly rapid development of 
America's fighting power, and the marvellous re- 
covery of the British army from its reverses of the 
spring. To Foch's genius I have already paid my 
tribute. In his *' Principles of War", which em- 
bodies his teaching at the French War College before 
the war, he says : " Great results in war are due to 
the commander. History is therefore right in mak- 
ing generals responsible for victories, in which case 
they are glorified, and for defeats, in which case 
they are disgraced. Without a commander no 
battle, no victory is possible. . . . The will to 
conquer, such is victory's first condition, and there- 
fore every soldier's first duty, but it also amounts 
to a supreme resolve, which the commander must, 
if need be, impart to the soldier's soul." Foch's 

240 



The Last Push 



will to conquer wavered neither in the dark days of 
1914 nor throughout the long period of trench war- 
fare, when many in high places were talking of a 
deadlock and planning for a patched-up peace, nor 
in those still more critical days of March, 1918, 
when he was first called to the helm to steer the ship 
from the rocks, and the storm of the German offen- 
sive was at its height, nor when the Germans sur- 
prised him in May and a second time menaced the 
capital of France. But the stoutest will in the 
world can at best refuse to admit defeat ; it cannot 
compel victory unless it is accompanied by know- 
ledge and^skill. Foch had the knowledge and skill 
which come of long study and careful thought, and 
these he added to his iron will. Great results in 
war are due to the commander, and, therefore, our 
first tribute must be paid to Marshal Foch. 

Even Foch could not have foreseen how nobly his 
will to conquer and his genius in planning would be 
supported. Early in April there had been one 
American division fit to take its place in the line; 
by November 11 twenty-four American divisions had 
fought in battle and had won, and there were many 
more ready to fight. I doubt if, even after the 
second battle of the Marne, there was a single Allied 
general who believed that it would be possible for a 
great American army to force its way triumphantly 
through the German lines. Many of the American 
divisions who fought in those last battles which 
brought us victory went into action with little or no 

241 



The Last Four Months 



experience of trenches, and with none at all of the 
hell on earth which constitutes a modern battle. 
The multiplicity of weapons and the complications 
of tactics which four years of war had produced, and 
the fact that an entirely new element had entered 
into war with the development of aircraft, all made 
the effective handling of troops in battle a far more 
difficult problem than it had ever been. Neither the 
American generals nor the American staffs had had 
experience in fitting together the numerous parts of 
the military machine or in handling large bodies of 
troops. For all these reasons a great attack by 
American troops against intact German defenses on 
the most difficult part of the front was a bold experi- 
ment. It was one thing to obliterate the St. Mihiel 
salient in thirty hours, to stop the German rush at 
the Marne, or even to drive the Germans from the 
Marne to the Vesle in cooperation with Allied 
troops. It was quite another matter to fight con- 
tinuously on a front of some twenty miles for close 
on fifty days, through line after line of German 
trenches, in a battle which entailed the employment 
of nearly three-quarters of a million American troops. 
It was done because America placed the pick of her 
splendid manhood in the field, and that manhood 
went ahead at the job in front of it without counting 
the cost. By doing its job it gave us victory in 
1918. 

Of the achievements of the British army in this 
last campaign, under its great leader, whose calm 

242 



The Last Push 



judgment, coolness in adversity, unselfish patience, 
when unsupported at home, and bold decisions when 
the time came to be bold were vital factors in 
om- triumph, a Briton can hardly write temperately. 
The "Old Contemptibles" of 1914 have become 
almost heroes of legend, and their wonderful recov- 
ery from the retreat from Mons, their advance to the 
Marne and the Aisne, are rightly reckoned as amongst 
the proudest records of the British army. I took 
part in the retreat from Mons and in the subsequent 
advance of our little army, and I saw both what our 
army had to endure in the spring of 1918 and what 
it accomplished in the last months of the war, and 
I am convinced that the achievement of the National 
Army of Great Britain transcends even that of her 
old Regular Army. That National Army for six 
weeks, from March 21 until the end of April, with- 
stood the full brunt of the greatest military effort of 
which Germany was capable. It was driven back 
at one point to a depth of forty miles, it lost 70,000 
prisoners and 1,000 guns and suffered 300,000 casual- 
ties ; 55 of its divisions were attacked by 102 German 
divisions, and still presented to the enemy a front 
he could not break. Then, starting on August 8, it 
fought uninterruptedly and victoriously for three 
months, driving the enemy back 120 miles, taking 
more than twice as many prisoners and more than 
three times as many guns as it had lost, and com- 
pletely routing the German armies by which it was 
opposed. This is a record with which any army 

243 



The Last Four Months 



coming fresh into the field might be content. That 
it was accomplished after four and a half years of 
bitter struggle is an achievement to which no words 
can do justice. 

The soldiers of France were not less splendid. 
They had to endure first while Great Britain was 
making of herself a great military power, and then, 
when Great Britain's efforts were insufficient to 
turn the balance, while America was placing her 
armies in the field. The Germans had again and 
again boasted that France was bled white, that she 
was weary of the war and would not fight. From 
1916 onwards, the next winter was to see the collapse 
of France. From every trial, with her country 
ravaged, and many of her richest provinces in the 
hands of the most brutal tyrant of whom history 
tells, she rose again to a new effort, until at last she 
drove her oppressor back to her frontiers and her 
poilus marched triumphantly through Alsace-Lor- 
raine to the Rhine." 

The soldiers of little Belgium, who for more than 
four years had protected the last little strip of their 
country west of the Yser after the German tide of 
invasion had been stemmed on that river, had, under 
the leadership of King Albert, whose spirit was as 
indomitable as that of Foch, issued from behind 
their water-lines, had fought with a fire and dash 
wholly wonderful in an army which had long been 
condemned to inaction and had none of the means 
of replenishing its ranks at the disposal of the other 

S44 



The Last Push 



Allies, and had conquered. It is idle to argue as 
to who won the war. Germany could not have been 
beaten in the field, as she was beaten, without the 
intimate cooperation of all the Allied armies on the 
Western Front directed by a great leader, nor with- 
out the coordination for a common purpose of all 
the resources of the Allies, — naval, military, in- 
dustrial and economic. If victory is to be attri- 
buted to any one cause, then that cause is not to be 
found in the wisdom of any one statesman, the 
valour of any one army, the prowess of any navy, 
or in the skill of any one general. Our triumph was 
due to the justice of our cause and to the faith to 
which, even in the darkest days, the free peoples of 
the world held firmly, — the faith that right is 
might. 



245 



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